


1985

by Alchemine



Category: Party Animals (TV)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Crack Treated Seriously, Dubious Science, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-02-10 19:39:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 66,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12918876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alchemine/pseuds/Alchemine
Summary: For no apparent reason, Danny Foster wakes up one morning in 1985. In need of help, he turns to one of the few people he knows or trusts in this time: stressed-out, chain-smoking, eighteen-year-old Jo Porter. An improbable AU tale of bad retro fashion, Eighties pop music, and hand-waving science.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this as a whim on Tumblr. When it broke 15,000 words, I thought I ought to gather it in one place, and now here we are. Apologies in advance for the lack of actual physics, hard-hitting political insights, or pretty much anything else except my two faves from this series having to deal with my all-time fave plot device of time travel.

_What the fuck is going on?_

Rain dripped from Danny’s hair and ran over his face. His vision blurred with it and he wiped his coat sleeve across his eyes, but it was streaming down faster than he could wipe it away. Half blind, he stumbled over to a closed shop front—its window full of the sort of television sets he remembered from childhood, with aerials on top and faux wood panelling on the sides—and leaned against the door, trying to catch his breath. A boxy old Vauxhall Cavalier whooshed past on the road, catching the edge of a deep puddle and throwing out a fan of filthy water that came within a hand’s breadth of soaking him where he stood. He fumbled his mobile out of his pocket, turning away a bit to hide it from curious eyes, and checked for a signal again, but there was nothing. The digital readout said 06:13, which seemed to be more or less the right time. If so, it was the only thing that was right at the moment.

He didn’t want to believe what had happened. It absolutely beggared belief, but everything he’d seen in the last half-hour—the cars, the clothes, the shops, the dates on the newspapers—seemed to confirm it. Unless he was having a colossal hallucination and was currently imagining all this from a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital, he had somehow gone to sleep last night in 2008, and woken up in 1985. 

Just the thought of it made him come over all dizzy and disoriented, as if his brain were exploding in slow motion inside his head. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to review the facts; create a little mental list the way he would for a thorny problem at work. 

 **Fact one:** He'd woken up in his brother Scott's flat, but it hadn't been Scott's flat. 

 **Fact two:** There'd been someone in the shower who most definitely had not been Scott, belting out a Rod Stewart song in a terrible off-key bass. 

 **Fact three:** He'd stumbled out into the road and seen...but there his brain started doing its exploding trick again and he had to stop.

He stuffed the phone back into his pocket and made another, more successful attempt at drying his face. He needed help, but who would help him? In 1985, he was three and a half years old, and Scott was seven, just a little kid who could barely tie his own shoes. His dad wouldn’t believe it—if Danny could even get in to see him without an appointment—and his mum would probably summon the authorities to take him away and have him sectioned. No recourse within his own family, then. Who else was there?

He flipped through his mental catalogue of everyone he knew, and abruptly landed on Jo, who would be seventeen or eighteen at the moment, old enough to offer genuine assistance, but still young enough, perhaps, to be open to strange possibilities. Grown-up Jo was one of the cleverest people he knew, at least when she was sober; wouldn’t teenage Jo be almost too clever for her own good as well? 

Danny thought about that and concluded that she would, and also that he would be able to trust her, if he could only convince her of what had happened, or at least seemed to have happened. Jo could be difficult, but she was a good friend to have in a crisis. He could only assume those things were true in both the past and the present. Future. Whatever.

That still left the small problem of how to find her. He knew her maiden name and the name of the school she’d attended—both were in her official biography, which he kept updated for her—but even in a less creeper-conscious age, he didn’t think it would look good for him to turn up at a Roman Catholic girls’ school and start making enquiries about one of their sixth formers. It probably wouldn’t be too difficult to work out where she lived, but he didn’t think her parents would appreciate him appearing on their doorstep any more than the nuns would, no matter how innocent his intentions. He’d been told by Future Jo herself that he had a ridiculous baby face, but he didn’t look _that_ young.

“Fuck,” he said under his breath, drawing a glance from a woman passing in the other direction. She was clearly on her way to work, dressed in what was probably the height of Eighties business fashion under her black raincoat and matching umbrella, and that gave him an idea: Suppose he could intercept Jo on her own commute from home to school and somehow talk to her that way? In 2008 she’d likely be delivered directly to the gate by a parent, but maybe in 1985 things were different; his mother had certainly complained enough about the daily school run to make him think it was a fairly modern development. At least he could give it a go and see what happened. It wasn’t as if he had much to lose at this point.

 _All right then_ , he thought, and set off.

The rain had slackened a bit, but it was still a long, wet walk to the area where he knew Jo had grown up, and by the time he arrived, the roads were fully awake and buzzing with morning traffic. Along the way, he’d found some tourist’s discarded map stuffed into the top of a bin, only a little damp from the rain, and had plucked it out with two fingers and brushed it off before tucking it into his coat pocket. He was ready to execute his plan, such as it was. 

When he thought he was close enough, he shut himself into a phone box to study the directory, trying to ignore an angry man outside who clearly thought he was taking too long, and found a hundred and three Rourkes. Eighty-nine of those had an address listed, and cross-referencing with his map revealed that only two of those eighty-nine lived anywhere near Saint Margaret’s Catholic High School for Girls. The first number he tried just rang and rang, but the second one came with a recording informing him that Peter, Elizabeth and Joanne were all out, but he could leave a message if he liked.

Danny declined to do so, and put back the phone handset feeling pleased with himself. This was the sort of thing he did for Jo all day long (only a lot faster, thanks to Google), and now those skills were coming in useful at the most unlikely time. He would have to tell her about it when he saw her. Well, not when he next saw her, but when he saw her—would see her? would have seen her?—in the future. No one had ever told him that of all the challenges involved in time travel, getting the verb tenses right would be one of the most difficult, he thought, exiting the phone box to let the angry man go in.

“Sorry,” he said as they passed each other, and got a grumbled “fuck off” in response, proving that at least some things were the same in every decade.

He crossed the road and set off toward the address he’d found, dodging cyclists and kids on their way to school. What would his current, three-year-old self be up to on a wet Tuesday morning, he wondered. Probably either at nursery, which he remembered only vaguely as a place where he’d had sand flung in his eyes and fought with other three-year-olds over tricycles with broken wheels, or at home, parked in front of _Play School_ or _Postman Pat_. That idea gave him a sudden impulse to go to his own house, try to catch a glimpse of himself through the windows, perhaps even see his father, who was alive and well in this time, but he squashed it down. He was interfering with the past enough already just by being here, and anyway he needed to find Jo. At the back of his mind, he knew he was fixating on her a little too intensely, as if merely seeing a familiar face would somehow make everything all right, but he thought he could be forgiven a bit of irrationality at the moment. He was still thinking it when he turned a corner and discovered the object of his search waiting at an uncovered temporary bus stop, hardly more than arm’s length away.

In their proper lives in 2008, he’d never seen Jo wearing a tartan kilt and blazer and carrying an overstuffed school bag, and he’d certainly never seen her smoking, which she was also doing. These things aside, he recognised her at once by the tilt of her chin and the way she was standing, umbrella popped up over her head to fend off a drizzle that was getting heavier by the minute. He eased up beside her, not too close, and stood there for a moment pretending to watch for the bus. When he thought it was safe, he stole a sideways glance, only to get a nasty surprise when he found her looking back at him.

His first impression was that she was almost shockingly young, her face still softly rounded, her dark hair longer and held back at one side with a plastic tortoiseshell slide. There was mascara on her long lashes, artfully applied to escape the nuns’ notice, but no other makeup, and no jewellery except for a wristwatch and a pair of tiny silver studs in her earlobes. She blew out a curl of smoke, fixed him with the direct gaze he knew so well—even at eighteen, there was no flirting or coquetry from Joanne Rourke, one day to be Joanne Porter, member of Parliament—and said, rather sharply, “Do you need something?”

 _Just you_ came automatically to Danny’s mind, but he couldn’t say that without sounding like a stalker or worse _._ The Jo he knew sometimes accused him of looking like a lost puppy on purpose to keep out of trouble, and now he put on that expression and cranked it up to eleven, doing his best to radiate harmlessness and innocence. Current Jo didn’t seem any more impressed by this tactic than her older counterpart, so he cleared his throat and tried something else.

“Just wondering when the next bus is coming.”

“Oh. Probably another ten minutes, but it’s anyone’s guess really.” Jo turned her wrist over and looked at her watch, an expensive model that she would still be wearing, twenty-three years from now, with a brown leather band instead of the black one it currently sported. “They’re so slow when it rains. You’re going to be soaked by the time it does come.“

“Yeah, I—I forgot my umbrella at home. I’m an idiot.” Danny tried out a smile, hoping it was friendly and not creepy, and the corners of Jo’s mouth turned up just a bit in response. She dropped her fag end on the wet pavement and crushed it with the toe of her shoe, and Danny watched her do it, noticing as she did that her bare legs were pale and blue with cold between the hem of her kilt and the tops of her knee-high socks.

 _She must be freezing_ , he thought, and then abruptly remembered himself and returned his eyes to her face. He was so used to being younger than Jo, and having her call him a ridiculous boy and tell him to grow up for fuck’s sake, that it felt extremely weird to think of himself as her elder. But he was, and he would have to be careful. Future Jo wouldn’t hesitate to have a stranger arrested (or possibly push him in front of the oncoming bus) if she thought he was behaving inappropriately, and he was quite certain Current Jo would as well.

They hadn’t even got to the part yet where he would have to explain the time-travel thing to her, he thought, and wondered if he’d been temporarily insane when he came up with this idea. Waking up in 1985 could do that to a person.

“There’s the bus now.” Jo pointed behind him, and he turned to see it approaching. It stopped with a whoosh of pneumatic brakes, and they both automatically queued up behind a withered old lady in a brown cloth coat and pink scarf, who had been standing a little distance from them.

As she made her slow but determined way up the steps, Danny looked past her, saw a bright yellow notice with black letters commanding him to PAY HERE EXACT FARE PLEASE, and realised for the first time that he was armed with nothing but an Oyster card that wouldn’t work for another two decades, and a handful of coins with the wrong years and designs on them. All right, the bus driver was bored and probably wouldn’t look too closely at anyone’s money, but what would happen when it actually changed hands? What if objects from the future dissolved into dust when someone from the past touched them, or caused some sort of temporal collapse that would turn the bus into a black hole?

 _Don’t be stupid_ , he told himself. He’d been touching things ever since he woke up here, and nothing had imploded yet. His body might technically be part of this time—at least, a form of Danny Foster existed here, probably having a nice morning cup of milk as this version of him stood panicking at a bus stop—but his clothes and shoes were all from 2008 and seemed to be doing just fine in the rarefied air of 1985.

“Are you getting in?” Jo was clearly running out of patience with him. She’d folded up her umbrella in preparation for boarding the bus, and there was a cloud of tiny, silvery raindrops clinging to her hair. “Only I’m already going to be late, and you’re wet enough as it is.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Danny mounted the steps, put a sweaty nervous hand into his trouser pocket, and fished out a coin. He held his breath as he handed it over, but nothing happened, and he moved farther into the mostly full bus in a daze, scanning for an empty seat that didn’t have too many mysterious stains on its upholstery. All the other passengers around him looked like extras for a scene in a film about the Eighties—right down to the three punks spread out across the long row of seats at the back, with their lace-up Docs and their studded belts and their aggressively dyed hair—and it all seemed so perfectly staged that he wondered for a wild moment if he were the victim of some elaborate prank for a hidden-camera series. But then teenaged Jo didn’t fit into that picture, did she?

Thinking about Jo made him look for her, just in time to see her sit down two rows ahead of him, wet umbrella at her feet and school bag on her lap, and whip out a vintage-looking Sony Walkman and a set of the black adjustable earphones he remembered using as a child. He watched her twiddle the radio tuning wheel and wondered what she was listening to. If Current Jo’s media habits were anything like Future Jo’s, it was probably the BBC World Service.  

 _Never mind that_ , he told himself. _Think about how you’re going to explain yourself._

The air in the bus was damp and smelt of wet wool and people’s boots, and he could barely see through the window for all the rain on the outside and greasy fingermarks on the inside. He rested his head against it and considered his situation as the bus jolted along. He had to get Jo to stand still and listen to him for long enough to tell his story, and he had to do it without frightening her needlessly. He had a few photos on his phone of the two of them together, including one from her disastrous fortieth birthday party, that might serve as evidence, but he wasn’t certain she’d believe they were real. Until a few hours ago, would he have believed it if a strange person had turned up and wanted to show him photos of his forty-year-old self? Like fuck he would have.

The bus came to a halt under a looming horse chestnut tree, and Jo stood up, gathered her things and disembarked along with a group of other passengers. Danny went too, and as he stepped out into the cold–pleasantly bracing after the warm soupy atmosphere inside the bus–he got his first look at St Margaret’s Catholic High School for Girls. It was a tall, sprawling building with a red brick façade, rows of arched white windows, and a large stone relief of the saint herself standing guard over the front doors. The black wrought-iron gates were open to admit a stream of uniformed girls that was rapidly diminishing to a trickle, and at the top of the steps that led into the school, Danny could see a terrifying nun who had clearly missed the Vatican II memo about switching to modern dress, watching them go in.

Abruptly, he realised Jo had got a head start on him and scrambled after her. Always a fast walker, she was going at top speed so as not to be late, and he barely managed to catch up with her before she reached the gates.

“Sorry, can I speak to you just for a moment?” He did a sort of awkward sidestep and got in front of her so she’d have to stop or run him over.

“What? No.” Jo tried to dodge round him. “I’ve got to go in. Why are you following me? We don’t have some sort of relationship just because I told you when the bus was coming, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I know, and I’m not following you. Well, I am, but not like that. I’m not doing it to annoy you. I need to talk to you about something important.”

“What can you possibly have to talk to me about? I don’t even know you.”

“You do, though,” Danny said, a bit wretchedly. He hadn’t expected it to be upsetting for Jo not to recognise him, but it was, rather.

“No, I really, really don’t.”

“You do. I can explain, Jo, if you just–”

“How do you know my name?” Now she was starting to look frightened, which was the thing he’d been hoping to avoid. Her hand clenched round the grip of her umbrella as if she thought she might have to hit him with it. “You’re not some sort of stalker, are you?

“No! God, no. I’m not going to break into your house and boil a bunny or anything like that.”

“Boil a—”

“You know, like in _Fatal Attraction_.” Jo was shaking her head, looking mildly nauseated. “It’s a film. Erm, you probably haven’t seen it yet.”

 _Because it won’t be released for another two years,_ he thought _. Well done, Daniel._

“Look, I’m doing this all wrong,” he said aloud. “Let’s start over. My name’s Danny Foster, and I promise I’m not a stalker or a nutter. I’m just–I’m having a very strange day.”

“Oh, are you? Because I’m beginning to think I’m having one as well.” She gave him a pointed look, and he squirmed.

“I know. It’s all my fault and I’m sorry, but if you could just give me five minutes. That’s all I’m asking for. We don’t have to go off alone together; we can just stand here and talk if you like.”  

Jo let out a sharp, disbelieving laugh that reminded him more of her future self than anything she’d said or done so far. “You must be joking. This place is absolutely crawling with nuns. If they see a strange man talking to one of us near the school, they’ll kill you first and phone the police after, and they’ll probably be right to.”

Danny ran his hands through his wet hair in frustration. “All right, I get that, but isn’t there someplace else public where we could go? Someplace where you’d feel safe talking? I swear that’s all I want to do.”

“Yes, you said.” Jo bit her lip and glanced over her shoulder at the last stragglers disappearing inside the school’s main entrance. “Shit. Look, I really do have to go, but…you don’t actually look like a murderer, and you’re just odd enough for me to want to know what you think you need to tell me so badly. I’ve got things to do all day, but can you come back at four?”

“Yes,” Danny said, relieved. “I’ll be here—”

“No, no, not here. There’s a café in the next road over. Meet me there.”

“Of course, whatever you like. Thanks very much.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” She readjusted the strap of her bag on her shoulder. “I’ll wait for ten minutes and that’s all, so don’t be late. And don’t do anything weird, or I’ll have the nuns after you, and believe me, you’ll wish it were only the police.”

“I won’t.”

“We’ll see about that,” Jo said forbiddingly, and departed through the gate, leaving Danny alone on the pavement.


	2. Chapter 2

Having parted from Jo outside the gates of St Margaret’s, Danny spent seven miserable hours trying to stay occupied and dry. A museum would have been perfect if there’d been one nearby, but there wasn't; he’d already walked so far to find Jo that he didn’t think his feet could bear any more of that just yet, and he didn’t want to spend his last bits of money on transport. He lingered in a bookshop for as long as he could, and then when there was a break in the rain, went out and walked along the paths on the green, past a half-flooded and deserted children’s playground and under trees that dripped down his neck.

Along the way, he thought with a slowly growing sense of horror about what was going to happen when night fell, as it would all too soon. A few months ago, he’d done a massive amount of research on homelessness and written up a report on it for Jo—Future Jo, that was—so he knew more than he wanted to about the perils that awaited rough sleepers, ranging from being pissed on by passersby to being beaten and robbed to simply dying of exposure. He didn’t want any of that, but what other options did he have? Even if he was able to make Current Jo believe his situation, he didn’t think she was going to let him spend the night on her bedroom floor as if they were a pair of schoolmates having a sleepover. Maybe her parents had a garden shed and he could wedge himself in between the wheelbarrow and the hedge clippers. 

Just before four, he doubled back, found the café Jo had mentioned, and discovered she was there ahead of him, seated at a table with an open packet of Marlboro Lights in front of her and the dead ends of three of them in an ashtray at her elbow. She also had a half-eaten croissant on a plate, and the sight of it made Danny’s stomach come to life and twist itself into gurgling knots. His last meal had been either eighteen hours or twenty-three years ago, depending on how you counted, and that was just too long.

 _Not now_ , he thought, and approached the table. Jo was reading a book, wearing the same scrunched-forehead look of concentration she always had when reading anything, but as he got closer, she saw him coming and laid the book aside. Her expression was neutral, but he could see her whole body visibly tensing, ready to fight or flee if it came to that.

“I thought you were only going to wait ten minutes,” he said.

“Starting from four. I was early.” Jo looked at her watch. “All right, Danny Foster, if that's really your name, I promised we could talk, and here we are. What’s so important that you had to follow me like a stalker to tell me?”

“Can I sit down?”

“Well, you’ll look silly just standing there, won’t you?” She gestured at the empty chair opposite her, and he pulled it out and sat. He’d had plenty of time during his long, dull day to think about how to break the news to her, and at last had decided just to tell her and then produce whatever proof he could. It was the sort of story that was equally unbelievable whether you crept up on it from behind or confronted it head-on.

“Are you going to eat the rest of that?” He pointed to her croissant half.

“No, why?”

“Do you mind if I have it?”

“I suppose not,” Jo said warily, as if she thought he might be planning to take it home with him and add it to a creepy serial-killer collection of artefacts. She pushed the plate across the table to him, and he took the croissant and tried, not very successfully, to eat in small bites to make it last longer.

“You could buy a whole one, you know,” Jo said, watching him. “They do sell them to anyone.”

“It’s complicated.” Danny suppressed an urge to lick his finger and use it to wipe up the crumbs on the plate. “Thanks for that.”

“You’re welcome. Now let’s have that story.”

This was the moment Danny had been dreading, but there was nothing for it. He steeled himself and began. “This morning when I stopped you outside the school, I said that you knew me.”

“Yes, and I said I didn’t, because I don’t.”

“Well, you’re half right,” he said. “You don’t know me now, but…you do know me in the future. That’s where I’ve come from. I fell asleep last night in 2008, and I woke up here.”

There was a long, long pause, and then without a word, Jo stood up and bent to collect her school bag from the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving. This is ridiculous. Do you think I’m some sort of idiot?” She stuffed her book down into the bag—it was _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ , Danny saw—and buckled the front flap with an angry snap. “I don’t know what I expected from someone who followed me off a bus. Fuck off and goodbye.”

“No, wait,” Danny said, feeling desperate.

“Why should I do that?”

“You promised me five minutes and it hasn’t been that long yet,” he said. “And I’ve got proof. Let me show you.”

“Oh Christ,” Jo said, but she sat down again, bag clasped against the front of her blazer. “What’s your proof?”   

“Here.” Danny pulled his remaining coins out of his pocket and spread them out on the hard tabletop, amongst the white rings left by a thousand cups of coffee and tea. “Look at the dates on these. Nothing from before 2001.”

“So you’ve got some sham coins. That doesn’t prove a thing. And you can go to prison for counterfeiting, by the way.”

“They’re real. And there’s more.” He opened his wallet and started laying out credit and cashpoint cards just above the scatter of coins. “See? This one expires in 2009. This one expires in 2012. What sort of bank issues a card that doesn’t expire for almost thirty years?”

“If you can forge coins you can forge those too,” Jo said. She looked at her watch again. “You’ve only got two minutes left.”

“All right, here’s something else.” Danny looked around, but the café was in the midst of a lull and there were only a few other occupied tables. When he was sure no one was watching, he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out his mobile and flipped it open, bringing the tiny screen to life.

“What’s that?” Jo leaned closer, genuinely curious for the first time in their conversation. Her hair fell forward over her shoulders, and she pushed it back in a gesture so familiar that Danny felt lightheaded with déjà vu.

“It’s a mobile phone. They’re going to be huge in about…” He had to think about it. “Another ten years, maybe. It takes photos as well. Look at this.” He pressed buttons and brought up a shot of the two of them together at a reception for a visiting ambassador. “That’s you and me last year, in 2007.”

Jo’s eyes narrowed as she bent over the small, slightly pixellated image of her future self wearing a dark blue dress and pearls, smirking crookedly at the camera with Danny’s arm draped round her shoulders.

“It does look like me a bit, but…” She glanced up sharply. “You’re not going to try to tell me you’re my boyfriend or something, are you? Because you’re too old for me and definitely too young for the woman in this photo, so either way I’m not having it.”

“No, that’s not it at all. I work for you. We’re colleagues.”

“You work for me? Where?”

“You’re a junior minister in the Home Secretary’s office,” Danny said. “I’m your researcher.”  

Jo still looked suspicious, but she sat back a bit in her chair and let her bag slide to the floor of the café. “All right, I admit that does sound like a job I’d want to do, but you still haven’t shown me any real proof it’s true. How do I know that’s really me in the photo? Or that your mobile phone thingy actually came from the future?”

“Have you ever seen one before?”

“No,” Jo said, “but new things are invented all the time, aren’t they? Maybe it’s from Japan and the shops will be full of them by Christmas.”

Danny ground his teeth. He knew all about Jo’s penchant for poking holes in arguments—it was one of the traits that would make her a fearsome debate opponent in their own time—but at the moment it was just making things difficult. He cast about for some bit of information he could give her that she couldn’t refute, and suddenly remembered a story she had told him once when she was very drunk.

“Okay,” he said. “You do want to go into politics after you’ve got your degree, don’t you?”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“I know you have. You told me—or you will tell me, later—that you’d been interested in a political career ever since you were a teenager. But you also told me that before then, when you were nine or ten, your big dream was to ride horses in the Olympics. You’d seen the Montreal Games, and you thought the equestrian competition was amazing and wanted to do it too, but you knew your parents wouldn’t buy you a horse or let you have riding lessons, and you were afraid that people would laugh, so you never told anyone. Am I right?”

Jo’s face went chalk-white, and Danny felt like a monster, but pressed his advantage. “I am right, aren’t I?”

“You can’t possibly know that,” she said faintly.

“But I do. I know because you told me.” He left out the bit about how she’d been so pissed at the time that he’d nearly had to pick her up and pour her into the waiting cab at the end of the evening. Asking her to accept that he’d come from the future seemed like enough without also mentioning the drink problem that awaited her there.  

“Oh my God,” Jo said. She propped her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands, as if she were worried it might fall off without support. Dusk was gathering fast outside the café’s windows, the lights from cars and shops casting long, bright streaks of red and white and yellow onto the wet black tarmac, and he wondered whether anyone would be missing Jo if he kept her here much longer. He didn’t know anything about her home life at this age; for all he knew, she was expected for a family meal at six sharp every evening.

“Jo? You all right?”

“Not really, but let’s pretend I am to make things easier.” Jo straightened up and rubbed both hands over her face. “Okay. We’ll assume for a moment that I believe you, which I’m not at all sure yet that I do. At some point in the future, I become a politician, and you’re a member of my staff.”

“Yes.”

“And how long have you known me?”

“Erm…almost ten years? I met you when I was seventeen and I’m twenty-six now. You hired me as your researcher five years ago.”

“Fair enough, but you’re not just my researcher, are you? I mean we must know each other pretty well if I’ve told you about my secret childhood horsey fantasies.”

“Well, yes,” Danny said, wondering where she was headed with this. “We’re friends too. We’ve been through a lot together.”    

“Right,” Jo said. “So consider this, Danny. When we met—meet—whatever, did I behave as if I’d met you before?”

“No,” Danny said. He thought back to that long-ago evening, to being uncomfortable in his white shirt and black waistcoat and irritable about being pressed into duty. “I was serving canapés at a party. I offered you some smoked salmon crostini and you said thanks. That’s all.”

“And in all the years we’ve been friends and colleagues, I’ve never, ever said anything to make you think that when I was eighteen, you’d turned up outside my school raving like a madman and we’d had this conversation?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s strange,” Jo said. “Because if this is happening now, then in the future it’s already happened, hasn’t it? Now-me knows about it, so Future Me must as well. Why wouldn’t she have told you?”  

“I’ve got no idea,” Danny said. “Maybe you didn’t know it was me, or you forgot.”

“I’m fairly certain this isn’t something I’m going to forget,” Jo said. She slid a Marlboro out of the packet and tapped it thoughtfully on the tabletop, then put it away again as if deciding now wasn’t the time. “So, Daniel—”

“Ugh.” Danny pulled a face.

“What?”

“You always do that.”

“Do what?”

“Call me Daniel when you’re annoyed about something.”

“I’m not annoyed,” Jo said. “I’m confused. I still don’t really know who you are or what you want, just that you know a lot more about me than you have any right to, and you’ve got a photo of me looking my mum’s age, which is frankly terrifying as well as impossible. Can I see that photo again, by the way?”

Danny opened his phone again and thumbed the right arrow to flip through the photos. “I’ve got others too. This one’s from your fortieth birthday party.”

Jo leaned too far over the table to inspect it and got stray croissant flakes all down her front. “I look upset. Why do I look upset at my birthday party?”

“It was a long night,” Danny said, thinking it probably wasn’t the best idea to bring up the topic of her crap marriage on top of everything else. “Here, this is the one you wanted to see.”

“Can I?” Jo held out her cupped hands, and he put the phone into them, glad he’d already resolved the question of whether people in the past could handle objects from the future. He watched as Jo frowned over the image and then touched it with the tip of one finger, tentatively, as if it might electrocute her on contact.

“It’s me,” she said, almost to herself. “It really is. It can’t be, but…it is.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” Danny said. He felt warm with relief, nearly jubilant, but then Jo looked up from the screen and he saw her eyes were glazed with tears, her lip trembling. Up until this moment, he’d been thinking of her as a sort of Looking-Glass version of the Jo he knew, younger-looking and in a retro costume, but essentially the same. Now, all at once, he could see how young she really was–still clever and determined, but a long way from being the woman he was slated to meet in another thirteen or fourteen years.

“Don’t,” he said helplessly. He knew better than to touch Future Jo when she was crying, and he wasn’t about to try it with this Jo either, but he took the phone out of her hands, folded it up so she wouldn’t have to look at her older face anymore, and set it on the table between them. “I didn’t mean to frighten you with all this. I’m scared too. I just–I need help, and I don’t know who else to ask.”

Jo sniffed and dragged the back of one hand across her eyes, as if her own tears irritated her. “Haven’t you got parents? Or, I don’t know, a teacher or a neighbour or anyone else? Why has it got to be me?”

“I trust you,” Danny said.

“No you don’t.” She snatched up his mobile, fumbled a little as she worked out which end the hinge was on, then thrust it out with the screen facing him. “You trust _her_. I’m sure she’d know what to do, but I don’t. I can’t help you.”

Danny stared at the photo, and his own face stared back at him, grinning like an idiot, floppy fringe falling into his eyes. At his future self’s side, Future Jo wore a secret half-smile that seemed to say _You’re well and truly fucked now, aren’t you, Daniel?_ It was like looking through a window into a place he desperately wanted to go, but couldn’t quite reach no matter how hard he tried.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Current Jo, who was still watching him. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have asked you. I’ll go and—you should just try to forget this ever happened. Don’t say anything to me about it when we meet properly, in the future. That could be why you never did, after all; because I told you not to.” He pushed his chair back with a clatter, stood, and did up the top button on his coat against the rain that was bucketing down outside again. “See you. Thanks for the croissant.”

He made his way back through the café, now half-full with yet another cast of extras in ugly-hip Eighties wear, drinking dishwater-strength tea and coffee and stuffing their faces with sandwiches. They all probably had homes to go to, he thought bleakly: nice cosy homes with heating and lights; soft beds heaped with blankets; overstuffed chairs and warm slippers. A frigid gust of wind and spray hit him in the face as he pushed the door open, and he paused for a moment, unwilling to take that first step out into it.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Jo said. “This is the second time today you’ve just been stood there like a big lump, blocking up a door. Come on. You can share my umbrella.”

Danny turned, startled, and found her just behind him, with her bag slung over her shoulder and the umbrella in her hand, ready to unfurl. Her eyelids were a little puffy and the tip of her nose was pink, but the tears were gone, and there was a grim, stubborn set to her face that he knew all too well.

“I’m not promising I’ll actually be any use,” she said. “Somehow they haven’t covered time travel on any of our exams, if you can believe it. But…I’ll try.”

“Are you sure? Really?”

“I’m sure,” she said. “Possibly insane, but sure. Here, taller one carries it.” She pushed the umbrella at him, and he popped it open and held it over both their heads as they set off into the wet darkness.


	3. Chapter 3

They hadn’t gone far along the road before Jo pulled him off the pavement, up a shallow set of steps, and into the vestibule of a building, its marble floor cracked with age and fouled with wet, muddy footprints. A row of cloudy glass globes hung on chains from the ceiling overhead, casting a muted yellow light down on them both.

“What’s this?”

“Sshhh. It’s a library. We need someplace to talk where no one will see us, or tomorrow it’ll be everywhere and I’ll have half a dozen frustrated Catholic schoolgirls asking me if my older boyfriend’s got a friend for them.” Jo pointed to a set of double doors with diamond-paned windows. “If you go through there and past the reference library, you’ll come to another door with a flight of stairs behind it. Go right down them, and at the far end of the corridor, there’s a little room the library staff hire out for meetings and things. Wait for me there.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Gather up some books for the look of it,” Jo said. “You’re not very stealthy, are you? I see why you’re a researcher and not part of the Security Service. Go on.” She gave Danny a little push, and he went obediently, marvelling at the fact that his first instinct was to do as Jo had told him, even when she wasn’t exactly Jo.

On the other side of the doors, he was greeted by a comforting billow of the familiar old-book smell of paper and ink that had been the same for as long as he could remember, and no doubt would have been much the same if he’d been thrown back to the library at Alexandria. He imagined trying to ask some Ptolemaic scribe if there were any papyri that told you how to reverse accidental time travel, and grimaced to himself. All things considered, he could have done much worse than the Eighties, where at least he spoke the language and understood more or less how to behave.

No one so much as glanced at him as he walked through the library’s vaulted entrance hall, passed the reference library with its rows of long tables, and opened the stairwell door, which was just where Jo had said it would be. The stairs had rough metal plates on the treads to stop people slipping, and his steps echoed hollowly through the white-painted stairwell and into the long corridor that lay below. Glass-fronted display cases lined both its walls, full of signed first editions and carved bookplate stamps and antique reading specs that at another time he would have liked to examine more closely. Instead, he kept going all the way to the end, mindful of the need to get out of sight.

He opened the door to the meeting room cautiously at first, but found it dark and deserted, and after he’d located a light switch, empty except for a round table and a few low-backed, leather-padded chairs. He sat down in one of them to wait for Jo, and almost at once was swamped with a wave of fatigue: he’d barely stopped moving ever since he woke this morning, and between the hours of walking, the cold rain, and the shock and fear of the whole situation, he was utterly knackered.

As he was wondering whether he ought just to put his head down on the table for a moment, the door opened halfway and Jo slid through the gap, a small pile of books clutched in her arms. Setting them down on the table, she dropped into the chair opposite his and regarded him, forehead creased with concern.

“Are you all right? I mean, I only met you this morning, but you didn’t have those massive black circles under your eyes then.”

“It’s all just a bit–well–”

“Yes,” Jo said, “I can imagine it is.” She pushed back the sleeve of her blazer and looked at her watch. “The library closes in an hour, and I’ll be expected home not long after that, so perhaps you ought to tell me a bit more about how you got here. You didn’t really just wake up in the past this morning, did you?”

“More or less,” Danny said. “I know, you’d expect it to be more dramatic—like I’d fallen through some sort of glowing portal or bumped into an old magician who put a curse on me—but it wasn’t. I came in late from work last night and Scott wasn’t home—”

“Who’s Scott?”

“I forgot, you won’t have met him yet either. He’s my brother. We live together—well, I kind of live with him. Anyway, he wasn’t there, and I thought I’d just have a sandwich and then go to bed, but I sat down to watch a bit of the news first. I still had my coat on because it’s brass monkeys in Scott’s flat until the heating’s been going for at least an hour, and…I think I must just have nodded off there.”

“And?”

Danny chewed his lip, remembering it. “Then next thing I knew, it was morning, and the flat was the same—I mean the windows and doors and fixtures were all in the right places—but everything in it was different. All of Scott’s furniture was gone; even the sofa I was sitting on had changed. I was still half asleep, and I thought, _This is a dream, and if I go outside I’ll wake up_ , so I went stumbling downstairs and out the front door. It was pissing down outside, just the way it is now, and that woke me all the way up in a flash, and I saw things weren’t just wrong in the flat, they were wrong everywhere.”

Jo let out a breath. “Then what?”

“Then,” Danny said, “it was a lot like one of those films where some poor idiot finds himself in the past and goes crashing around trying to work out what’s happened, right down to the bit where I saw a newspaper full of headlines about the miners’ strike and hostages in Beirut. I pinched myself nearly black and blue, trying to snap out of it, but I was still here. That’s when I started thinking about who I could go to and decided to look for you.”

“Christ.”

“I said that a few times as well.”

“I’m sure.” Jo frowned and nibbled at a fingernail. “Had you seen me the night before?”

“Yeah, of course. I see you every day and night during the week unless one of us is travelling. Sometimes at the weekends too. We practically live in each other’s pockets, Jo, especially since–” He broke off, remembering that he didn’t want to burden her with the troubles she’d had the previous year.

“Since what?”

“Erm, since things got busy at work,” Danny said, hoping she wouldn’t press for any more details. He shuffled her stack of books around, looking at the titles, which were so eclectic she must just have taken one from the end of every shelf she passed: _Viking Age Burials in Northern England_ , _Field Guide to the Butterflies of Europe_ , _The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry_. “So, what do you make of it all?”

“Well,” Jo said, clearly thinking furiously as she spoke, “there’s always a possibility that it might just work in reverse, isn’t there? I mean, if you fell asleep in 2008 and woke up in 1985, then you might fall asleep in 1985 and wake up again in 2008. It would make sense.”

“Does any of this make sense?”

“Not really,” Jo said, “but you may as well try the simplest solution first. If you go to sleep tonight and you’re still here when you wake up tomorrow, then you’ll know that falling asleep’s not the thing that made you slip back in time. And if you _are_ back where you belong, then your problem will be solved, and you can go and ask Future Me what the hell she was thinking, keeping this from you for years and years.” She paused. “Speaking of sleeping, I don’t suppose you’ve got a place to do that, have you?”

Danny shook his head. “I can’t go back to Scott’s flat—well, what’s going to be Scott’s flat eventually. I didn’t bump into the person who lives there, thank God, but someone obviously does, and they’re not going to be pleased if a stranger turns up asking for help, any more than you were at first.”

“No room at the inn.”

“Exactly.”

“Well…” Jo looked uncomfortable and a little embarrassed. “I’d take you home with me if I could, but my parents would go spare, so that’s right out. But you can’t sleep in a doorway or under a tree in the park in this weather, either. Aren’t there hostels for people with no other place to go?”

“Yes,” Danny said, thinking back to the report he had written for her in the future, “but you can’t just turn up there unannounced either, you’ve got to be referred. No Room at the Inn, Part Two.”

Jo played with the band on her watch, unbuckling it and buckling it again, and then turned it over and looked at the face. “We’ll have to leave soon, they’ll be closing. Or—hang on a minute.”

“What?”

“Suppose you just stay here for tonight? In this room, I mean. If you lock the door, the library staff might try the knob to check it without actually looking inside, if they come down here at all. It is a bit out of the way.”

“What if they do open the door and I get caught?”

“Tell them you came in to read and fell asleep.” Jo nodded at the books spread out between them, in the circle of light from the hanging lamp. “I’m sure you wouldn’t be the first person to have done that, and the worst they can do is tell you to leave, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but…”

“Oh, come on, Danny. Are you always such a rule follower?”

“Most of the time,” he said truthfully. “It annoys you in the future too.”

She laughed. “Well, you’ll have to get over it for one night. If you’re still here in the morning, just wait until the library’s been open for a bit and walk out like an ordinary patron, and then come and find me. I’ve got some money saved from birthdays and things—I can’t get at it just now, but I can tomorrow. It’s not much, but it should be enough for you to find a cheap room somewhere until we can work this out.”

“Oh God, Jo, I can’t take your money.”

“You’ve got twenty-three years to pay me back,” Jo pointed out. “And you’ve asked me for help, so now you’ve got to let me help. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be lucky and it won’t come to that, anyway.”

Danny flailed about desperately for any other course of action that might work, but came up with nothing. He wasn’t sure why he was surprised really; this was exactly the sort of thing he ought to have expected from Jo, who was a firm believer in ends justifying means in their shared future as well. At last he gave in and accepted it, as he usually did.

“All right, we’ll try it.”

“Good,” Jo said, smiling. She pushed back her chair and picked up her bag. “Don’t be offended, but I hope I won’t see you again for another fifteen years, give or take a few.”

“Don’t be offended, but I hope the same thing,” Danny said. “December 1998. Be ready for it.”

“I’ll put it in my diary,” Jo said, giving him another dizzying rush of déjà vu. She rooted around in her bag, pulled out a scrap of paper, and scribbled something on it. “Address and phone number. Come round in the morning if you’re still here. Both my parents are gone by nine.”

“Thanks,” Danny said, taking the paper and deciding not to mention that he’d already got this information on his own; he didn’t want to start her thinking he might be a stalker again. “Haven’t you got to go to school, though?”

“There you go following the rules again,” Jo said. “I’ll be there. Now lock the door behind me and try to get some sleep.”

“Okay. Thanks again.” He would have liked to hug her, but put out his hand instead, and she gave it the firm shake he’d seen her future self administer a thousand times to diplomats and constituents and other politicians, both friend and enemy. As soon as she’d let go, she slipped back through the door into the corridor, and Danny turned the lock and tried various ways of arranging the chairs into a bed before realising that he was too tall and would have to spend the night half sitting up. Oh well, at least he was under a roof.

He switched off the lights in the room, and in the dark, he flipped open his mobile and browsed through a few photos: Scott giving a two-fingered salute to the camera, Kirsty pouting prettily behind her desk, a few snaps he’d taken of scenery on a trip up north, and the various views of Future Jo with expressions ranging from coolly amused to forcing a smile through distress.

It was comforting to see these scenes from his real life, but he only allowed himself a minute or two to enjoy them before switching the phone off to save the battery. Settling down in one chair, he put his feet up on another, spread his coat over himself as a makeshift blanket, and waited for the previous night’s accident to repeat itself in reverse.


	4. Chapter 4

Before Danny even opened his eyes, he knew that it was morning, and that Jo’s test hadn’t worked. The air around him smelt of wood and paint and carpeting instead of his discarded socks and those disgusting sausages Scott kept buying and cooking, and he could hear the faint hum of an industrial-strength ventilation system instead of the ordinary early-morning traffic in their road.

The good news was that the library staff hadn’t found him and handed him over to the police. The bad news was that he was still locked in a room deep in the underbelly of the library, that his neck and back hurt from sleeping stretched across two chairs, and that he desperately needed the toilet. On balance, it seemed bad news was winning over good for the second day in a row.

Groaning quietly, he unfolded himself from his torture rack, pressed the power button on his phone to check the time, and found that the library had opened ten minutes ago, which meant he could at least leave the room instead of pissing in a corner like some sort of wild animal. He stretched arms and legs as best he could, gathered up Jo’s books from the night before, and tried to smooth his sticking-up hair before unlocking the door and easing it open far enough to check the corridor. He had a brief vision of himself abruptly coming face to face with a floating, spectral librarian, but all was clear, and he made it up to the main floor without seeing anyone either living or dead.

There were already surprising numbers of people coming in through the doors where he’d entered the night before—mothers arriving with their toddlers for the morning rhyme time session, old men settling in to spend the day perusing the racks of newspapers, and grubby-looking students prepared to stake out the best seats in the study area. Danny merged with them as nonchalantly as he could, glad that the dark trousers, white shirt and tie he’d worn to work two days and twenty-three years before were nondescript enough to blend into almost any decade (although he had a nasty feeling they were beginning to smell less than fresh), and deposited the stack of books on an empty bit of shelf before escaping to the men’s toilets. With his most urgent need out of the way, he examined his dishevelled, red-eyed self in the mirror, then washed his face and hands and rinsed his mouth, which tasted as if something had prised it open and crawled inside to die in the night. Maybe Jo had a toothbrush he could use. And a razor. And a shower.

 _And a spare roast dinner wouldn’t go amiss_ , he thought. The hunger that had been an annoyance yesterday was a bottomless roaring pit today, and as he gulped down a double palmful of water from the sink to try to quiet it, he realised he felt dangerously shaky. He had better hurry up and get to Jo’s, or he’d fall over along the way.

The sky outside was still grim with clouds, but it wasn’t actively raining, which he decided to count as another tick in the “good news” column. He stood on the library’s steps for a moment to get his bearings, and noted that while no one passing by was on the phone, either talking or typing away madly with their thumbs, no one looked particularly interested in giving him directions either. They were a grim lot, these citizens of twenty years ago, tramping along in their ugly vintage jumpers and plastic rain bonnets and gigantic square-lensed specs, or sitting on benches and reading newspapers full of events he only remembered from modern history lessons at school. Well, he’d find his way without their help, the miserable beggars.

He’d never missed Google Maps more in his life, but he unfolded the paper map he’d acquired and from that, managed to locate the address Jo had given him, which was back in the direction from which they’d both come yesterday. It had been a five-minute bus ride, but it took nearly half an hour to walk, and he really was ready to fall over by the time he got there. Her house was a large, semi-detached one fronted by carefully tended shrubbery, in a road not unlike the one where she would eventually live with Iain, and he felt weak and bedraggled and unsightly as he pushed the bell and waited.

After a moment, Jo opened the door–not in school uniform today, thank God; being seen with her in it had made him feel pervier than he ever wanted to feel again–and greeted him with a disappointed expression.

“It didn’t work, then.”

“No,” Danny said, and she sighed.

“You’d better come in. Don’t worry, there’s no one else here.”

He followed her through the house to the kitchen, where she sat him at a cluttered breakfast bar covered with the detritus of the Rourkes’ daily family life.

“You’ve got to be starving,” she said, and he nodded, hoping he didn’t look too pathetic. “What do you want to eat?”

“Anything. Everything. If you’ve got a dog I’ll fight it for one of its biscuits.”

Jo snorted with laughter. “I don’t think you’ll have to go that far.” She turned away to open cupboards and peer into the fridge. “Cornflakes? Cold chicken? Leftover cake?”

“Yes please,” Danny said, and she banged a box of cornflakes, a jug of milk and a blue plastic bowl down in front of him.

“Here, start with these and we’ll see how you get on. Don’t make yourself sick, though. I don’t want to clear that up.”

He got through two bowls of cornflakes, three slices of buttered toast, a fist-size chunk of cake and a chicken leg before he admitted defeat and stopped, stuffed nearly to the point of pain, but finally able to think straight again. Jo had made them both a cup of tea while he was head down in the cereal bowl, and now she perched on the stool beside his, her cup wrapped in both her hands, and regarded him with curiosity. She’d put on pale-pink lipstick this morning, he saw: with Future Jo, that would mean she was girding herself up for some sort of battle, but this Jo was probably just taking advantage of a day out from under the nuns’ gimlet eyes.

“Well, Daniel,” she said.

“Well, Joanne.”

Jo scrunched her nose up at the sound of her full name. “All right, all right. Obviously what we hoped would happen didn’t happen, because here you are, but did anything happen at all? Did you have any prophetic dreams or mysterious flashes of insight in your sleep?”

“The only thing I got in my sleep was a sore neck.” Danny tilted his head gingerly from side to side, wincing. “I’ve still got no idea what happened, and I had lots of time to think about it, sitting there on my own in the dark. It really was a completely boring, ordinary Tuesday right up until the moment when I did my Marty McFly impression.”

“Your what?”

“Another film. It’ll be in the cinemas in a few more months. You should see it. Anyway, I honestly can’t remember anything weird happening, just going to work and then coming home in the rain.”

“It was raining here too,” Jo said thoughtfully. “I wonder—no, that couldn’t have anything to do with it. Was the date here the same as the one you left?”

Danny nodded. “Tuesday, the nineteenth of March, both places.”

“And there’s no significance to that date for you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“This is making my head hurt,” Jo said. She finished her tea and set her cup down. “Have you checked your pockets? Maybe someone did a reverse pickpocketing and slipped you some miniature time-travelling device disguised as a coin?”

“I showed you my coins yesterday, remember?”

“Still.”

Danny pushed aside his bowl and plate, empty now except for a few drops of milk and a gnawed chicken bone, and turned his pockets out on the worktop, trousers first and then coat. “Wallet, coins, mobile, map, that slip of paper you gave me—”

“No keys?”

“I put them down after I let myself into the flat,” Danny said, thinking back to his movements on that night. He’d been tired, running on autopilot, not thinking of much beyond whether he was going to have pickle on his sandwich or not.

Jo nodded. “Anything else?”

He dug deeper into his left coat pocket. “Notepad, gum—that’s for you, you’re always asking me for some—oh God, don’t look at that.” He grabbed for the bright foil condom packet he’d accidentally thrown down alongside everything else, but not fast enough to stop Jo shooting out a hand and picking it up.

“With ribs and dots,” she read aloud. “Designed to speed her up and slow him down. Really?”

“It’s not mine.”

“It’s not?” Jo looked up at him with raised eyebrows. “Don’t tell me _this_ is the disguised time-travelling device.”

“It’s my brother thinking he’s funny.” He snatched the packet back from her and stuffed it down into his coat pocket again. “He’s always hiding them in my pockets, for good luck, he says.”

“Does it work?”

“Does what work?”

“Hiding them in your pockets,” Jo said. “Not the other _it_. I’m sure that works.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Danny said, exasperated. He could feel a slow burn starting in his face and knew it was only a matter of time until it became visible.“Look, can we not have this conversation? Let’s just go through the rest of these things and make certain there’s nothing strange about any of them.”

“Sorry,” Jo said, not sounding very sorry at all. She touched the spread-out items delicately, with the tips of her fingers, as if she were a medium trying to contact him through his possessions. “It all looks perfectly normal to me, but it’s not mine. Does anything look wrong to you?”

Danny stared down at the small, sad collection of objects that now represented the whole of his real life, searching for some sort of pattern or anomaly, and then slowly shook his head.

“No.”

Having reached a dead end, they decided to break for a bit, and Jo escorted Danny upstairs and showed him to a bathroom, where he had one of the most amazing showers of his life. He’d spent many an unwashed weekend at home, lying on the sofa watching hours of documentaries and growing a crop of greasy dark stubble on his cheeks and chin, but somehow two days in the past had left him as manky as if he hadn’t bathed in a year. He lathered himself liberally with Jo’s coconut-scented soap and shampoo, and then stood there with his eyes closed as the spray cooled from hot to warm to barely tepid, feeling as if the filth of ages was running down the plughole.

Less pleasant was getting dressed afterward in old clothes that belonged to Jo’s dad, who seemed to be about his own height, but bulkier, so everything flapped and draped oddly. What did it say about this entire experience, he wondered, trying to tuck in the billowing extra fabric of the shirt, that wearing Jo’s father’s underpants wasn’t even the strangest thing that had happened to him since it began? He’d never met Mr Rourke, who had died a few years before Danny had come to work for his daughter—a fact Danny most definitely intended to keep to himself—and under the circumstances he wasn’t sure whether that belonged in the Good or Bad column.

Clean and dressed, he went downstairs again and found Jo out in the rainy back garden, huddled up under the scant protection of the house’s eaves to smoke.

“You’ve got to get off those things,” he said, coming up beside her. “They’re terrible for you.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Jo exhaled a long stream of smoke through her nose, then crushed the end out against a decorative stone and dropped it into a metal watering can half-full of rain. “I forgot to tell you, I phoned round this morning before you came and I think I’ve found a place for you to stay. Real hotels were all too expensive, so it’s a hostel—the sort you pay for, not the homeless sort. I hope you like sleeping on a bunk in a room with seventeen other people.”

“As long as it’s got a roof over it, I’ll be all right.”

“Good, because it’s the best I could do. It took ages just to find one that said they’d let you in without showing them a passport first.”  

“Christ, I miss the Internet.” He saw Jo’s querying look and answered before she could ask. “It’s kind of a—a worldwide computer network of information.”

“Like in _The Terminator_?” Jo’s lips quirked upward in a half-smile. “See, there’s a film I do know.”

Danny laughed. “Yeah, a bit, but less evil. It’ll be along in another nine or ten years and make things like finding accommodations a lot easier.”

“I’ll look forward to it.” Jo shivered and pulled the overlong sleeves of her blue Fair Isle jumper down over her hands to warm them. “I was thinking about that last night, Danny. Not the—what did you call it?”

“The Internet.”

“Right, not that specifically, but about things from the future in general. Do you think it’ll change too much if I know about them? I don’t want this to be like one of those stories where someone travels back in time, and then when they go home they find out civilisation’s been wiped out because they had tuna for lunch one day instead of egg and mayo.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten that chicken leg after all,” Danny said, deadpan.  

Jo scowled up at him in a way that was very reminiscent of her future self. “Don’t be stupid. You know what I mean. I was awake for hours last night, lying in bed and thinking about it. Even if it’s not on such a big scale, what if I don’t become who I’m meant to be now? You say I’m an MP in the future, but you don’t know every tiny step and decision I took to get there, do you?”

“Well, no.”

“So what if I do something a bit differently now—something that doesn’t seem important at the time—and I end up losing an election I ought to have won and not going into politics at all? What if I end up, I don’t know, selling ice creams out of a van or something?”

“That’s a bit extreme, Jo.”

“But what if? I don’t want to second-guess every choice I make for the next twenty years. Would you?”

“Of course not,” Danny said, “but you might not have to. I’m not an expert on time travel or anything, but isn’t there some sort of paradox theory that says you can’t really change the past, because whatever you do, you’ve already done? It’s like you said yesterday; in the future, all this has already happened, so whatever choices the Joanne Porter I know has made, they’re the same ones you’re going to make. You couldn’t make different ones if you tried.”

“Joanne _Porter_? Oh God, am I _married_ in the future? No, don’t say—” She reached up swiftly and put cold fingers over his mouth. “Don’t tell me anything about it. I don’t want to know.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

They were both quiet for a moment, watching the rain fall and listening to the muted noise of traffic on the main road. In the house next door, a woman’s muffled voice shouted for Paul and Samantha to come down and have their lunch, and Jo checked the time.

“We’d better get you to that hostel. My mum only works part-time and she’ll be home by three, and if she finds you here she’ll go mental. I’ll just go up and get the money, and something for you to put your other clothes in so you’ll look like you’re really travelling.”

Danny looked down at her, fierce and determined in her muddy boots and pink lipstick and outsize jumper, and felt the sudden warm rush of affection he got for her other self sometimes. “Thanks for this, Jo. I know it’s all confusing and hard on you and–I really appreciate it. I’d be lost here without your help.”

“You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you? Future Me, I mean.”

“For both of you,” he said, and she smiled, pleased.

“Come on, Danny. Time is short.”


	5. Chapter 5

Danny had stayed in hostels a few times as a student and knew not to expect luxury, so he was glad enough to be shown to a white-painted metal bunk in a room full of other bunks stacked two and three high, and told he could stow his things in the matching white metal locker underneath. He spent a decent night there, despite the drunken, thunderous snores of two large blond men who had the set of bunks just opposite him, and in the morning ate as much of the hostel’s free breakfast as he could before setting out to buy himself a working transport pass and a few other odds and ends, like soap and toothpaste and spare socks. These purchases made an alarmingly large dent in Jo’s saved-up pocket money, which she’d given him the previous afternoon along with an old rucksack stuffed with his dirty 2008 clothes, and he vowed again to find a way to pay her back somehow.

With his errands finished for the moment, he had nothing to do but wait for Jo, who had told him she’d meet him back at the hostel sometime after noon—the nuns would get shirty if she didn’t at least turn up for the morning, she’d said. He spent a few hours wandering, looking in the windows of shops that unironically sold vinyl records and Atari game systems and posters of Boy George, and being bumped into by old ladies with wheeled baskets who were intent on doing their shopping and clearly thought he was taking up too much space on the pavement. He still felt disoriented by the sights and sounds of 1985, but at the same time, a part of his brain was adapting to being here, in the same way you temporarily adapted to being in a foreign country after a few days. He suspected he wouldn’t have to live in this decade for very long before it began feeling like home, but firmly pushed that thought away. His proper place was waiting for him in the future, and the best thing to do was to get back there as quickly as possible, and leave 1985 to the Danny Foster who belonged in it.

When he thought he’d killed enough time, he made his way back to the hostel and found Jo waiting for him outside, perched on the wide stone railing that ran along either side of the front steps. She’d changed from her uniform into ordinary clothes—clumpy boots and Levi’s with a heavy green Army-style jacket over the top to ward off the chill—and her hair was pulled back into a haphazard ponytail, the way she often did it in the future when she was rushed or couldn’t be bothered.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said as he reached her.

“What about?”

“Do you remember yesterday when you said you weren’t a time-travel expert?”

“Yeah, well, I’m not. No one is.”

“True,” Jo said, “but there are people who know about it in theory, right? Einstein, for example.”  

“Einstein’s dead.”

“I know that,” Jo said witheringly. “But he wasn’t the only physicist ever to have lived, was he? There are lots of them.”

“Do you know any?”

“Well, not quite,” Jo said. “But I’ve got a friend, Annie, whose brother is doing a PhD in physics, so he’s got to be worth at least half a physicist, don’t you think? We could talk to him and find out what he thinks about how you got here. Obviously we can’t tell him the whole truth, but we could say you’re doing research for a book or an article or something like that. You are a researcher, after all.”

“Seems fair,” Danny said. This was the first time Jo had mentioned friends, which hadn’t really surprised him: like most politicians, grown-up Jo could be very charming when it suited her, and she had an address book crammed full of acquaintances who were good for a lunch date or a birthday dinner, but she was truly close to almost no one except her mother, and, he supposed, to him. He found himself oddly relieved that she had some sort of support at this stage of her life.

“Do you know how to reach him?” he asked, seeing she was waiting for some further comment, and she grinned—the triumphant grin he recognised from future moments when she felt she’d scored a point—and thrust out her hand to show him a telephone number scrawled in black ink on the palm.

“All right then,” he said. “Let’s find a phone.”

They squashed into a phone box together to place their call, and Annie's brother, whose name was David, said he could spare an hour to chat if they’d buy him a meal in return. Danny, listening in with his head pressed against Jo’s so they could share the receiver, dug into his pocket, checked their funds and gave her a thumbs-up to say they could, and they arranged to meet at the same café where he and Jo had met two days before.

When he arrived, David turned out to be just two or three years younger than Danny, middling height with a chipped front tooth and longish dark hair that needed a wash. He shook hands very seriously and said he’d have a sandwich, thanks, and the three of them sat down, with Jo and Danny on one side of a table and David on the other, as if they were interviewing him for a job. Jo, who was good at filling awkward silences, asked him about his course and whether he’d seen his sister lately, and then when his sandwich arrived, turned the topic smoothly to what they were hoping to discuss.  

“Right, time travel.” David took a large bite of sandwich, chewed and swallowed. “Of course you’ve got to understand this is all pure theory and speculation, nothing that can really be proven. What is it you’re writing, Danny?”

“Fiction,” Danny said, “but I’d like it to be based in fact, at least as much as it can be.”

“Do you know anything about physics?”

Danny shrugged. “I had it at school. We built one of those contraptions that’s meant to stop a raw egg breaking when you drop it from the roof. It didn’t work.”

“Well, I’ll start at the beginning then.” David drew a breath, and sensing that they were about to be treated to a long and rambling lecture, Danny cut him off.

“I’d love to hear the background of course, but I think what I’m most interested in is how time travel might actually work in practice.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, how would you get back into the past in the first place,” Danny said, “and if you did, would it change the future?”

“Oh, the Grandfather Paradox,” David said, He ate another bite of sandwich and brushed crumbs from his chin. “If you travelled backward in time, could you accidentally kill your own grandfather and prevent yourself from being born?”

“Could you?” Jo leaned forward at Danny’s side, anxious for an answer to the question that he knew had been gnawing at her.

“Probably not,” David said. “The predominant theory is that if you could travel back in time—which of course you can’t, but if—you wouldn’t really move in the opposite direction on your own timeline, you’d go to an alternate timeline that lay just alongside it.”

“But wouldn’t an alternate timeline be so different you’d know straight away it wasn’t your own? Hitler would have won the war, or dinosaurs would have never gone extinct, or something like that?” Jo was at the edge of her chair, nearly vibrating with suppressed anxiety.

David shook his head. “Wouldn’t have to be. It might be so similar you’d never notice any difference, like…a species of bird that was blue in your timeline might be red in the alternate one, or the Icelandic word for ‘crosscut saw’ might not exist, little things like that. And don’t forget, not all changes are necessarily bad; that’s just what makes for exciting books and films. In an alternate timeline, Hitler might never have been born at all, or dinosaurs might be tame like domestic animals and you’d have a pet one in your garden.” He folded a bit of sandwich crust in half and popped into his mouth. “But that’s only one theory. There’s another one that posits that the act of travelling in time itself might be the precipitating event that splits the timeline in two.”

“Like taking an exit on the motorway,” Danny suggested.

“Well, not exactly, because the road beyond the exit isn’t there until you’re driving on it, but it’s not a bad analogy.” David pushed the second half of his sandwich aside. “Who’s got something to write with?”

“I have.” Jo dipped into her shoulder bag and produced a pencil and a hardbound diary, and David tore a blank page from the back and smoothed it out on the table.

“Okay, here’s the motorway—” He drew a heavy dark line from the edge of the page to the middle. “And here are all the little drivers in their cars, going merrily along in the same direction. But you, Danny, you’ve had a long day at work, and after a bit you can’t keep your eyes open any longer and you fall asleep at the wheel.”

Danny didn’t dare look over at Jo, but he heard her suck in a breath with an almost imperceptible hiss and knew what she was thinking. It had to be an accidental choice of words—he was sure it was—but it was disturbing to hear David casually describe the way he’d come here.

“When that happens,” David continued, oblivious in his enthusiasm for this subject, “your car drifts off the motorway and onto a slip road, like so.” He added a short diagonal line. “But then instead of spitting you out someplace else, that slip road brings you back up again and onto an identical version of the motorway that’s going in the same direction.” Another heavy line, parallel to the first one. “It’s exactly the same as the first motorway, and none of the drivers know anything has happened, because up until now nothing _has_ happened. But now that this second motorway exists, it may keep going in the same direction as the first one, or it may diverge and go in a completely different direction. Nothing changes in the original timeline, but in the new one, anything’s possible.”

“Do you mean we—the people on the second motorway, that is—are just _copies_? Not real?” Jo’s voice trembled a bit, but she kept herself together, although the bit of her face Danny could see was terribly pale.

“No, not at all. The people on the second motorway are just as real as the people on the first one. They _are_ those people, in fact. They still have their histories and personalities and everything that makes them who they are, they just exist in two separate places.” David picked up the uneaten half of his sandwich, bit into it, and went on thickly, through a mouthful of bread. “If this theory’s true, it’s likely that there are thousands and thousands of motorways—alternate timelines, that is—that have split off at different times for different reasons. It’s marvellous to think about, isn’t it?”

“Marvellous,” Jo said faintly. She fumbled on the floor between her feet and Danny’s for her bag, caught hold of the strap and slung it over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, I need some air. I’ll be just outside. You two carry on.”

Danny watched her push through the door of the café and stop on the pavement outside. She leaned up against the plate-glass window, and he saw the tiny flare of a match in her cupped hands, followed by a plume of smoke. It occurred to him that this was exactly the moment when Future Jo—or was it Alternate Jo?—would have reached for a drink, which made him wonder in turn if every one of the thousands of versions of Joanne Porter, _née_ Rourke, had some sort of addiction she used to cope with life.

 _Probably all the Danny Fosters are clumsy idiots_ , he thought, and turned his attention back to David, who had finished his sandwich and was drinking the tea he’d ordered with it.  

“About the motorway idea,” he said. “If the two motorways are one until they split, why would the second one be at a different point in time? Shouldn’t they be the same?”

David shrugged and pushed a greasy clump of hair out of his eyes. “Could be the act of splitting is what causes the time jump. A sort of lag between one time stream and another. No one knows.”

“I see,” said Danny, who didn’t really. “And one more thing. If someone did get onto that second motorway, would there be any way for them to get back onto the first one again? Some sort of junction or…?”

“Well, it’s all just a theory, as I said,” David said with a rather uneasy grin. “No one’s ever actually done it, at least not that we know of.”

“Yes, of course, but in theory?”

“In theory…you’d probably have to go back to the place where you left the first motorway and try to replicate the conditions that existed at the time as closely as you could.” He glanced at the window. “Is Joanne all right out there, do you think? She looked a bit shaky when she left.”  

“I’ll just go and see,” Danny said, standing up. “You wouldn’t mind settling up, would you, if I give you the money? If she’s not well, I’ll need to see her home.”

David said that would be fine, and Danny thanked him profusely for his help, reclaimed Jo’s pencil and diary, and left him at the table to finish his tea.

Outside, clouds were beginning to cover the sky again, and the air was harsh with the damp, raw chill of late winter. When he caught up with Jo, still leaning against the glass as if she needed it to hold herself up, her cheeks were scarlet with cold, giving her a hectic, febrile look that he wasn’t sure he liked.

“You all right?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. It’s a lot to take in.” Jo coughed abruptly, turned away to smother it in the sleeve of her coat. “I wasn’t expecting all that—all that _stuff_ about motorways and different timelines. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but definitely not that.”

“Neither was I,” Danny said, “but at least now we know.”

“Yes,” Jo said. “We do. And do you know what it means, Danny? If what he said is true?”

“What?”

“It means the me you know in the future isn’t really me at all, she’s someone else. That’s why she didn’t tell you about this. It never happened to her.”

“We don’t know if it’s true, though,” Danny said. He could see Jo starting to get upset, which in his experience meant navigating a fine line between using a calm voice to talk her down from the ledge, and pissing her off by coming across as if he were trying to manage her. “David said it was just a theory, and even he’s only half a physicist by your own assessment.”

Jo shook her head, her face set in stony lines of certainty that made her look years older than he knew she was. “I don’t think it’s just a theory. I think it’s right.”

“Why?”

“Because I know myself, Danny. I know people change over time—God knows someone tells me every day that I’ll change my mind about this or that when I’m older—but I can’t see myself ever changing so much that I’d keep a secret like this from you. I don’t have a problem with bending the truth for the right reasons, but I don’t lie to people I really care about. Does the Joanne you know in the future do that?”

Danny hesitated, not sure how to answer. He could have listed off dozens of times when Future Jo had put on a winsome smile and deliberately misdirected someone to get a particular result, but it was true that she was usually honest with him. The only time he could remember her actively trying to deceive him was when her drinking had been at its worst, and she hadn’t been herself then.

“Not really,” he said.

“See?” A bus rumbled past, its backdraft whirling discarded handbills and empty crisp packets along the road behind it, and Jo hunched up her shoulders and pushed her hands deep into her pockets. “A real Future Me would have told you, because that’s what I would do. I’ve got no idea how I’d bring it up without sounding completely delusional, but I’d find a way. Future Me didn’t tell you, therefore Future Me doesn’t know, therefore Future Me is not me. Q.E.D.”

Danny scratched at his cheek, where the three days’ worth of stubble was getting ideas about turning into an actual beard. He hadn’t bought a razor, thinking he might be home before he had to shave, but it seemed things weren’t going to work out that way. “Okay, so what if she’s not? What if David’s right and this is an alternate timeline that split off when I came here? Does it make a difference?”

“It’s just…if I’m not the person you know, that means we’re not friends really.” Jo bit her lip. “It’s too bad. I was starting to like being your friend.”

“You _are_ ,” Danny said firmly. “It doesn’t matter if I’m going to know this version of you in the future or not, I know you right now, and that’s all that matters.”

“Don’t,” Jo said, pained.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t call me that. I’m not a _version_. I’m me.”

“Well, I’m a version too,” Danny pointed out. “There’s another one of me in this timeline, even if he is still wearing trainer pants. But no matter what, the Danny and Jo who are standing here right now are friends, all right?

“All right.”

“Look at how much you’ve helped me. I’d be starving and freezing to death under a bridge without you.” He gazed down at her, huddled into her army jacket against the cold; dark wisps of escaped hair blowing round her face as the wind picked up. “Speaking of which, we’ll both freeze to death if we stay out here much longer, but we’ve got to talk about what to do next. If you still want to help, that is. I’ll understand if you don’t.”

“I promised I would, didn’t I?” Jo pulled her hands out of her pockets and pushed up a sleeve to look at her watch. “I’ve got an hour and a bit before I need to be home. Where do you want to talk? I’m not going back in there.” She nodded toward the door of the café.

“Back to the hostel,” Danny said. “Come on, we’ll catch the next bus.”


	6. Chapter 6

Jo wasn’t allowed in the all-male dormitory, so they helped themselves to the hostel’s free coffee and went into its lounge, which was painted in horrible shades of electric pink and blue, and had long benches with vinyl cushions that wheezed when you sat on them. At this point in the early evening, most hostel guests were still out exploring and the lounge was mainly vacant, but a mixed group on the far side of the room had seized control of the communal stereo and were blasting a Dire Straits album, inadvertently but helpfully providing cover for a private conversation.

“Here, this’ll do.” Danny sat down in a corner where two benches met, then reached over, snaffled an empty ashtray from the next table and put it in front of Jo, who gave him a rather pale smile.

“I thought you wanted me to get off them.”

“Not while you’re looking so shaky. Drink your coffee too, it’ll warm you up.” To set a good example, he gulped some of his own coffee, which was weak sauce compared to the stuff that Scott’s French press put out and the triple-shot lattes he bought for Future Jo on his way into work every morning, but was still hot and better than nothing.

“I ought to have stayed in the café.” Jo leaned against the high back of the bench and exhaled smoke at the ceiling. “David’s probably phoning his sister right now to tell her I’m losing it. He might even be right.”

“You’re not losing it.”

“You say that as if you’ve seen me really lose it.”

“I have, and you’re not there yet,” Danny said. “Want to hear what else David told me after you went outside?”

“I’m not sure I want to, but I think I need to.” She tucked her feet up underneath her and lit another fag off the end of her first one. “Let’s hear it.”

“He said the way to get back to the original timeline was to go to the place where the split happened and try to recreate those conditions.”

Jo frowned. “Wasn’t that your brother’s flat, or what’s going to be his flat in the future?”

“Yup.”

“Only you said someone else lives there. How are you going to explain that you need to sit on their sofa in the middle of the night and wait for a time vortex to swoop you up?” Jo drank some coffee and pulled a face. “God, this is awful. If you wanted to settle my nerves, we could have gone for a real drink. I am eighteen, you know, not twelve.”

“Maybe later,” Danny said. Given what David had told them about diverging timelines, he didn’t know whether this version of Jo was going to develop a drink problem or not, but he wasn’t going to contribute to the possibility. “And I’ve got no idea how I’m going to explain it. I’m pure pants at that sort of thing. You always see right through me when I try to make up excuses.”

“Not me,” Jo said softly. She dug at the rim of her coffee cup with her thumbnail, making a ring of crescent-shaped gouges in the polystyrene. “Her. The other me.”

“I’m pretty sure every one of you is cleverer than every one of me, so it’s all the same,” Danny said. “On that note, I don’t suppose you’ve got any brilliant ideas?”

“My brain’s on empty at the moment. I’ll be lucky to remember how to get home.” Jo carved a letter J into the side of the cup like a monogram.

“Well, think about it and tell me tomorrow,” Danny said. He reached over and took away the cup before she poked a hole right through it, and she let it go without protest, her thoughts clearly on something else.

“Do we have until tomorrow? I mean, he didn’t say there’s a time limit, did he? Like the farther you’ve gone in time from the split, the harder it is to go back?”

“He didn’t, but I didn’t ask.” Danny drank the rest of his coffee, which really was as bad as she’d said, and tossed his empty cup and her half-full one into a nearby bin. Across the room, the group with the stereo got to the end of Dire Straits and after a short argument about what to listen to next, put on Tears for Fears instead. “We are financially limited, though. As cheap as this place is, you still can’t pay for me to stay here forever.”

“You could find a job,” Jo said. “Do you know how to do anything apart from being an MP’s researcher?”

“No,” Danny admitted.

“Well,” Jo said with the hint of a smile, “if you’d like to wait another fifteen years, I’ll be happy to review your CV.”

“Ha ha, funny girl.”

She’d been teasing, but for the first time, Danny found himself really thinking about what would happen if he simply couldn’t go home again–it would probably be easier to set up a false identity in this pre-Internet age than it would be in his own time, but then what would he do? Get another degree? Learn a trade? He couldn’t work in any sort of political role, where it would eventually become obvious that there were two of him, unless he found the Danny Foster who lived here at some critical point in his education and convinced him to do something else.

“It’s almost six, I’ve got to leave,” Jo said, interrupting his musings. “I’ll have to go to school in the morning tomorrow—no missing Mass on Fridays during Lent—but I’ll get away as soon as I can after and meet you here.” She gathered up her shoulder bag and held it on her lap. “I wish I could phone you if I thought of something brilliant in the night.”

“I do too,” Danny said. “It’d give me something to do apart from listening to the drunks in the next bunk over. They look like a couple of Norse gods, and apparently they quaff ale like them too.”  

That made Jo really laugh for the first time in hours, and Danny grinned, relieved to see her feeling better. No matter the timeline or version, he just wanted her to be all right.

With Jo safely on her way home, Danny went into the hostel’s reception area, where they were licensed to sell alcohol, and bought himself a single bottle of lager. It felt less than noble to spend Jo’s money this way after refusing to take her for a drink, but she wouldn’t know, and all the sobriety of the last three days was beginning to wear on him.

Bottle in hand, he wandered over to a window that faced the street and watched people walk past outside, thinking again about what he’d do if he had to stay here, find work, create some sort of life for himself in a time when most of the people he knew in his version of 2008 were still learning to ride a bicycle. He’d already pondered the possibility of working as a researcher for his dad, just to have some sort of connection to his family, but he wouldn’t be able to prove he had the right experience, or education for that matter. It was a conundrum he didn’t see any way of solving, other than getting back to his own time.

“Where’s your girlfriend?”

“What?” Danny turned, startled, and discovered that a girl had come up beside him–pretty in a retro sort of way, with lots of curly, sprayed hair, slouchy white boots, a denim jacket with tiny button badges stuck on the front, and pink lipstick that reminded him of Jo’s. Thinking about Jo made him realise, in rapid succession, that she was the girlfriend this girl meant, and that he was going to be the target of some sort of invitation if he admitted she wasn’t. Under other circumstances he would have been pleased, but at the moment he couldn’t deal with it. He had too much else on his mind.

“Er, she’s gone home for the night,” he said. “She lives here. I’ve just come down to visit her.”

The girl looked disappointed, but not completely discouraged. “She’s cute. Bit young for you though. I’m Julie, by the way.”

“Danny.”

“Well…we’re going out–” Julie inclined her head toward a group that included two other girls and the blond Norse ale-quaffers. “And I just thought I’d ask if you wanted to come along. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you. Your girlfriend will get you back all in one piece tomorrow.”

“Thanks, but I was going to turn in early. It’s been a busy few days.” Danny summoned up his best boyish grin (he could imagine both Future Jo and Current Jo rolling their collective eyes at it), and Julie pouted a little, but let it go.

“All right, if you’re sure. We’re starting at the Red Ship if you change your mind and want to join us.”

“Will do.”

He gave her a double thumbs-up, watched as the entire crew left, and then turned and headed for his room, both because he’d said he was going to, and because she couldn’t follow him there if she decided to come back. It was really too early for bed, but he stripped down to the T-shirt and underpants he’d been sleeping in and climbed into his bunk with its weirdly hospital-style bedding: white fitted sheet, pale-blue pillow flattened by a thousand heads, and a thin, darker blue duvet that the cleaners left folded at the foot of the bunk every morning.

He stretched himself out with a sigh and lay listening to the noises of people all around him. No one else had come into this dormitory yet, but he could hear muffled talking in the next one over, a group of girls laughing out in the corridor, and faint music coming from the direction of the lounge, where someone with a flair for goth seemed to have taken control of the selections. The room itself had a scent like the changing rooms at the gym in his own timeline, bleach mixed with tile floors and armpits and people’s socks. He closed his eyes, breathing it in, and then it hit him all at once that as familiar as these sounds and smells were, they were still part of a world that wasn’t his own. Whether it was the actual past or an alternate one, he didn’t belong here. He was out of place, a mistake.

It was like the feeling he’d had when he first stumbled out into the rainy Tuesday morning and understood what had happened, only much, much worse. Then he’d had shock and disbelief to cushion the blow. Now it rolled over him in a wave, a big, suffocating, dizzying wave of awareness, and he thought he was going to be sick. He didn’t dare try to stand up, but he turned onto his side and hung over the edge of the bunk, just in case, and then it slowly passed, leaving him sweaty and trembling and full of a pathetic, childish homesickness. He wanted Scott. He wanted Jo—not eighteen-year-old Jo with a cigarette in her hand, saying _I was starting to like being your friend_ , but the real, grown-up Jo he’d known for years. He even wanted his mother, for the first time since he was about ten.

 _Get a grip, Danny_ , he thought, and jammed the flat pillow down over his face, hoping he’d either smother or fall asleep.

Somehow the night passed, and in the morning he woke up to find the Norse ale-quaffers unconscious on their bunks—the snores were in a sort of rhythm today, where one of them drew in a great honking breath just as the other one exhaled–and his other roommates either gone or still trying to sleep through the noise.

Quietly, he got up, had a short, chilly shower that wasn’t a patch on the glorious one he’d enjoyed at Jo’s house, and then bundled up the clothes he wasn’t wearing and took them to the hostel’s tiny launderette. While they were washing and drying, he read someone else’s discarded newspaper and helped himself to the free breakfast, which was mostly Coco Pops and muesli and different sorts of bread, but was at least temporarily filling. He was just stuffing a contraband banana into his pocket for later when a voice said “Danny Foster?” and nearly sent him through the roof.  

“Yes?” He turned round, trying to look as if he hadn’t been trafficking in illicit fruit, but the man behind him—tall and dark-skinned, with a blue staff T-shirt and a harried expression—didn’t seem to care.

“You’ve got a phone call.”

“I have?”

“Yeah, and I have to tell you we don’t normally let guests receive calls at the main number here, but your friend’s very insistent. Come on.”

After that description, Danny wasn’t at all surprised to pick up the phone at the reception desk and discover that it was Jo. Speaking to her on the phone gave him a moment of intense disorientation, as if he were suddenly at home again and she was ringing him up to say she wanted a muffin along with her latte, and aren’t you on your way to the office _yet_ , Daniel? But Current Jo’s voice had a slightly different timbre than Future Jo’s, and Future Jo never would have opened the conversation by asking him how he’d slept.

“All right,” he said evasively. He had a whole host of things he didn’t want to discuss with her at the moment, from having let Julie think she was his inappropriately young girlfriend to his solitary bedtime freakout. He was feeling oddly guilty about having missed Future Jo as well, when this Jo was trying so hard to help him. “What about you?”

“Fine. When I did sleep, that is, which wasn’t much. I thought about how to get you back into your brother’s flat and I think I’ve got a plan. Can you meet me in an hour?”

“I thought you had to go to church or something.”

“I did go. I said I had period pains and got sent home after.”

“Oh,” Danny said, suddenly embarrassed. “Do you really?”

“That’s a bit of a personal question, Daniel.”

“Sorry.”

“You ought to be,” Jo said severely, and then laughed. “Anyway I don’t, but I was so pale from being awake half the night that they believed me, so I’ve got the day free. Can you meet me or not?”

“Yeah, of course,” Danny said, “Just tell me where to go.”


	7. Chapter 7

“You’ll have to tell me where to go, actually,” Jo said. “I want to see the flat. It’s where everything started, and we need to find out who lives there now. We’ll have to get them out if we want to try David’s recommendation for merging you back onto your own motorway, so to speak.”

“Oh.” Danny gripped the phone in fingers that were suddenly damp with sweat. He’d been missing home, but he wasn’t certain how he felt about returning to the scene of his arrival in this decade. He hadn’t forgot his mad, terrified plunge through the rain, on streets that were familiar and unfamiliar all at once. But he wouldn’t be alone this time, would he? Jo would be with him, keeping him anchored to reality, such as it was.

“Danny? Are you still there?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You should probably write this down. Ready?”

He gave her directions, then retrieved his washing and set off himself. He was worried about bumping into Julie again, but it seemed she, like his two Norse bunkmates, was still sleeping off her night out and was nowhere to be seen. He hated to think what Scott—not seven-year-old Scott, who was no doubt busy with a very important multiplication worksheet at the moment, but the Scott who kept stuffing his pockets with condoms—would have to say about Danny hiding from a girl who had seemed to fancy him, even when he was dressed in a baggy pullover borrowed from a middle-aged barrister. Probably Scott would say he _was_ a middle-aged barrister on the inside, he thought, and hunched his shoulders sullenly against the misty morning chill. At least he was back in his own clothes today: they hadn’t fared very well during their sojourn in the hostel’s tumble dryer, but they made him feel more like his real self.

The first train to arrive was heaving with so many people that he passed it up, and the second one wasn’t much better, but he managed to wedge himself in between an elderly Ugandan man wearing a quilted body warmer and lugging a plastic carrier bag that kept bumping into the knees of everyone around him, and a girl who had a waffle pattern shaved into one side of her hair and was listening to an antique Walkman like Jo’s, blasting German synthpop so loudly that her headphones vibrated with each thump of the drum machine. The old man caught Danny’s eye and somehow managed to convey with his gaze that young people hadn’t been like this in _his_ day, and then his bag whacked Danny in the kneecap again, with a heavy blow that probably would have knocked him over if they hadn’t been packed in so tightly.

Even having caught the later train, he beat Jo to their meeting place by a few minutes, giving him time for a long look at the building where he’d eventually live, both in his own timeline and, he assumed, in this one. The kitchen window with its multicoloured panes of glass wasn’t visible, but the tree in the front, still mostly leafless at this time of year, was right where it should be and only a little smaller. He leaned against the railing of the fence across the road—painted a slightly peeling dark green instead of the black he was used to—and tried not to look like a burglar casing a target until Jo arrived, somewhat out of breath, and surprised him with a peck on the cheek.

“What’s that for?”

“What do you think? Doesn’t Future Me ever say hello to people?”

“Yeah, of course,” Danny said, “but she doesn’t usually give her staff a good-morning kiss.”

“Well, you don’t work for me yet, do you,” Jo said, “so you’ll have to cope.” A damp gust of wind ruffled her hair, and she did up the top button on her coat, which was a smart red wool one today instead of yesterday’s Army jacket. “Brr, it’s freezing. Is that the place?” She pointed at the building opposite.

“That’s it. Scott’s is the corner flat on the first floor. What’s your plan?”

“It’s still in development,” Jo said. “First we suss out the residents, and then we decide what will convince them to go away overnight and leave the place to us.”

“One of them’s a bloke with a terrible singing voice,” Danny said, remembering the mangled sounds of Rod Stewart floating out of the shower as he stumbled around in a panic. “I could pretend I’m Simon Cowell and I want him to audition for _The X Factor._ ”

“The what?”

“A reality show.” He saw that didn’t make any more sense to her and clarified. “It’s a singing competition where they—never mind, it doesn’t matter. There really is some man living there, though, and I think he might have a wife or a girlfriend as well. The sofa I woke up on was a bit pink and flowery.”

“Don’t be sexist,” Jo said sternly. “Maybe he’s a man who loves pink flowers, have you thought of that?”

“Maybe,” Danny said. “How are you going to find out?”

“I thought we could start by knocking on the door,” Jo said. “He and his maybe-wife-or-girlfriend didn’t catch you wandering around in their sitting room, so they’ve got no reason to think you’re anyone suspicious, and goodness knows I look like a sweet, harmless young thing.” She put on a doe-eyed expression and gazed up at Danny, who snorted.

“Sweet and harmless are the last two words I’d use to describe you. And who’s being sexist now, by the way?”

“I’m not,” Jo said, “just using other people’s sexist assumptions against them. It’s completely fair.”

“If you say so,” Danny said, and pushed himself away from the railing. “Come on, Emmeline Pankhurst. You can do the talking.”

The climb upstairs was less creepily familiar than he’d expected it to be, not only because of Jo at his side, but also because in this timeline, there appeared to be kids living in the flat across the way, instead of the gym-obsessed accountant whom he and Scott both tried to avoid at all costs. A miniature blue bike with its stabilisers still on sat parked up on the landing, and two pairs of small, cheerfully patterned wellies—one with frogs and the other with ducks—had been set on the mat to dry. He pressed the buzzer for his own door, and in a moment, they heard footsteps and a woman opened the door a crack.

Danny jostled Jo’s elbow as if to say _See, I told you_ , and she ignored him and smiled sweetly at the half of a freckled, suspicious face they could see.

“I’m so sorry to bother you, but I wondered if you might help us?”

“Sorry, I’m not interested in buying anything.”

“Well, we’re not selling anything, so that’s all right.” Jo was ladling on the charm, and the woman on the other side of the door relaxed a little and let it swing wider, revealing vivid ginger hair to go with the freckles. Behind her, Danny could see the wall where Scott had a large abstract canvas, hung instead with a framed poster reproduction of Monet’s _Water Lilies_. He wondered if Jo was still set on the man of the house being the flower lover, but couldn’t very well ask now, not least because she was still talking.

“I saw the notice in the window downstairs about the ground-floor flat being available, and I was just wondering whether you could tell us if this road is very noisy at night? We’re hoping to move house soon, and my brother needs lots of quiet because he’s writing a book, aren’t you, _Darren_?”

“Yes, that’s right.” Danny offered up a smile and hoped he looked like the dust jacket photo of an aspiring young author. “I can’t concentrate when there’s too much noise. Poor _Jacqueline_ here has to tiptoe around in the evenings.”

“Oh?” The woman didn’t look terribly interested, but she was polite enough now that she didn’t think she was about to be sold a roll of raffle tickets or asked to join their religion. “Well, you could do worse, I suppose. There’s traffic, of course, and next door’s kids can make a racket sometimes when they’re playing, but they go to bed early.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.” Jo glanced up at Danny, who nodded as if in agreement, then back at the woman. “And it must be awfully safe, mustn’t it, if you’re not frightened to live all on your own. I don’t think I’d be that brave.”

“Well, my husband’s here too—Chris. He’s left for work already or I’d let you speak to him. He’s lived here longer than I have, actually; I only moved in when we got married last summer.”

“Did you? That’s marvellous,” Jo said warmly. “It’s not too late to say congratulations, is it? Well, congratulations anyway.”

This got a real smile from the woman, and she let the door open even farther, until Danny could see the long windows in the living room—dressed with filmy curtains instead of Scott’s wooden blinds—and the pink floral sofa itself. A tall chrome lamp with three frosted-glass shades in the shape of lilies lurked in a corner, looking like something from an old issue of _House Beautiful_. He was beginning to think he’d have a chance to inspect it up close soon, because at this rate Jo was going to get them invited in for a cup of tea.

“I’d ask you in,” the woman said, giving him a start by seeming to read his mind, “but I was just going to leave for work myself. If you do decide to move here, though, I’m sure Chris would be happy to meet you. He’s one of those people who likes to know the neighbours.”

“We’d like to meet Chris too,” Jo said. “And it’s been lovely meeting you…?”

“Sharon.”

“Of course, Sharon. Well, we’ll be on our way, and thanks so much for the information.”

Sharon said goodbye and shut the door, and Jo and Danny descended the stairs again, then went out through the main entrance into the cold.

“What was all that _My brother’s writing a book_ stuff?” Danny said when they reached the pavement. “You don’t look a bit as if you could be my sister, by the way.”  

Jo rolled her eyes. “Would you rather I’d told her I was your child bride? Come on, we’d better keep walking. She’ll think something’s the matter if she looks out the window and we’re just standing here.”

“Have you eaten anything yet today?”

“No,” Jo said warily. “Why?”

“You’ve never been good at breakfast unless someone else buys it and puts it in front of you. Let’s see if the sandwich shop down the road is there yet. It looks as if it’s been around for thousands of years in my time.”

“Serving sausage rolls to the Roman centurions?”

“Something like that.”

The shop was there, as greasy and decrepit as ever, and after a few whispered comments about salmonella, Jo bought a bacon sandwich for herself and one for Danny, who found he could eat again despite all the muesli he’d put away at the hostel earlier in the morning. They took the sandwiches, wrapped in greasy paper, and crossed the road to a little park where old men played chess on warmer days. As they did, it occurred to Danny that the old men of his future—or at least the future of the Danny who lived in this timeline—were currently middle-aged men, probably at work and not even thinking about the quiet, chess-playing lives they would one day lead. As a kid in his own version of 1985, he certainly hadn’t been thinking more than twenty years into the future, beyond his then-burning ambition to be a dustbin man and get to operate the big forklift that moved the bins.

The ground in the park was sodden, but the benches were fairly dry, and they found one tucked away under some lilac trees, which were doing their best to bud early despite the chilly March air. Jo smoothed her coat underneath her and sat down, and Danny handed over her sandwich and joined her.

“Okay, so what have we learnt?” He held up a hand and ticked off the points on his fingers. “She’s Sharon and he’s Chris, and their surname’s Miller—there was a label under the bell.”

“They’re newlyweds, more or less,” Jo said. “They’re older.”

Danny laughed. “No they’re not. She was in her early thirties at the most. Unless the invisible Chris is practically a pensioner, they’re young.”

“All right, but they’re not _young_ young. Not _student_ young.” Jo was pink-cheeked and huffy, as if she felt she’d committed a faux pas. “Stop laughing! You know what I meant.”

“I do, it’s just the idea of what Future You would say about a thirty-year-old being ‘older’ … okay, okay, I’ll stop.” He got himself under control. “What else do we know?”

“They both work, and Chris leaves early for his job—didn’t you say he was already in the shower at six in the morning?”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “And I don’t think they’ve got kids, or any on the way. She would have said when she mentioned the ones next door.” He unwrapped his sandwich and took a large bite. “So, what d’you think will get Sharon and Chris Miller, childless, double-income married couple, out of their flat for long enough to conduct this experiment?”

“Well, I was thinking we might tell them they’d won a romantic night away in a hotel, but that’ll take more money than either of us have got.” Jo nibbled thoughtfully at an edge of bacon. “Suppose we pretended to be from the council and said they needed to leave overnight so we could inspect the gas, or something like that?”

“That would work if Chris weren’t such a neighbourly type, according to his wife,” Danny said. “He’d chat with someone and find out they were the only ones asked to go.”

“What if we asked the whole building to go? We could write letters and put them under people’s doors.”

“That’s a lot of letters and a lot of people. And what are the odds one of them would try to complain to the council about it and find out it was all a sham?”

Jo sighed. “You’re not wrong. My parents would, if they got a letter like that. You’ve got sauce on your chin, by the way. No, not there—oh, just let me.” She took his paper napkin away and scrubbed at his face, not very gently.

“Ouch! Thanks, I think.” Danny put his hand over the spot to protect it from any more cleaning. “I liked your first idea better, actually. The money's a problem, but it'll be easier to get that than convince an entire building of people to clear out for a night. We could sell something, or borrow it. If you asked your parents, would they want to know why you needed it?”

“My mum might not.” She picked a few crumbs out of her sandwich wrapping and tossed them to a brown speckled starling that was hopping nearby. “We’d have to work out how much it would cost, and then arrange it with a hotel somehow. I only phoned cheap places when I was looking for your hostel; it'll have to be someplace lots nicer than that or they won't want it.”

“I can take care of it,” Danny said. “It’s the sort of thing I do for you all the time, in the future.”

“I keep forgetting about you working for me. Well, the other me.” Jo looked up at him with a small, rather crooked smile. “I thought a researcher would just read books and write reports all day long.”

“Well, I do, but I also manage your meetings and help you with speeches and answer letters from your constituents. And, it’s not really part of my job, but I do personal things for you sometimes as well.”

“You do? How personal?”

Danny shrugged. “It depends. Booking your travel. Ordering in your shopping. I’ve gone out to buy clothes for you before, in an emergency. I fetch your coffee every morning. I’ve got a key to your flat.”

“I see.” Jo threw more crumbs to the starling and then crumpled up the paper round her half-finished sandwich. “I hope I’m not a horrible boss to have. I get stroppy sometimes when I'm frustrated.”

“Don’t I know it,” Danny said, and wished he hadn’t when a stricken expression crossed her face. “You’re not horrible. I promise. We have our disagreements, and you can be hard on me, but it’s for my own good, mostly.”

“Yes, but—”

“But nothing. I told you when I first met you here that we were friends, didn’t I? And that I came to you for help because I trusted you? I wouldn’t feel that way if you were some sort of evil tyrant.”

“I suppose not.”

“Well, there you are, then.” He paused, and then added, “You might consider letting Future Danny take longer lunches, though. He’ll appreciate it.”  

This seemed to catch Jo off guard, and she burst out laughing, reluctantly at first and then wholeheartedly. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Good.” Danny put his arm round her shoulders and gave her a squeeze, and she leaned against him for a moment, still snorting a little with laughter. “Especially on Fridays, okay?”

“Okay.” She disentangled herself from him and sat up straight. “Come on, let’s go so you can start researching. Once we know how much money we need, we can work out the best way to get it.”

 


	8. Chapter 8

They went back to Jo’s empty house, where they would have unlimited access to a telephone, and up the stairs to her bedroom, which she’d kept firmly closed off when Danny was last here. He’d helped her move into the flat she would one day occupy post-divorce, and knew her future decorating taste tended toward Scandi chic, but that was grown-up Jo, and he wasn’t certain whether eighteen-year-old Jo would have a room still full of her childhood toys, or something more like his own teenage lair from not so long ago, with a floor covered in dirty clothes and walls plastered with photos of football players and pop stars.

The reality, as it often did, turned out to be neither of the above: she opened the door to reveal a single bed with an untidy scatter of decorative cushions; a poster of the Eiffel Tower on the wall to the left and tall shelves flanking the wardrobe on the one opposite; a fluffy heather-coloured rug underfoot and a white-painted desk pushed up to the window. She had a Tandy word processor instead of a typewriter, he noted; probably the tool of choice for the serious university-bound student in an era when desktop computers weren’t ubiquitous yet. On an upper shelf, he spotted a lone, forgotten model horse half-hidden behind some books, but decided not to mention it.

“Have a seat,” Jo said, making a vague gesture that could have meant anything from the bed to the floor to the straight-backed desk chair. Danny chose the chair, and she disappeared into another room, leaving him with nothing to do but look at her small collection of cassettes in their plastic cases and grin to himself at some of the titles. He wouldn't have pegged Jo as a fan of Soft Cell and Spandau Ballet, and yet there was the evidence, right in front of him. He made a mental note to tease his version of her about it when he got home, and then Current Jo came back, carrying a cordless handset and a telephone directory that reminded him of his efforts to locate her a few days ago. She set the phone on the desk and dumped the directory unceremoniously into his lap, where he managed to catch it just in time to avoid a testicle-crushing blow. 

“Argh! Watch it, you." He straightened the book out and flipped the cover open. "Okay, we've got to narrow this down a bit, or we'll be on the phone until 2008 gets here all on its own. What criteria do you want to include? The price, obviously—you’ll have to help me with that one, I still haven’t worked out what’s cheap and expensive in this time.”

“Price, yes.” Jo reached across him and took a sheet of paper and a felt-tip pen from the desk, then perched cross-legged on her bed to start a list. “And location as well, I think. I mean, I’ve never had a romantic night in a hotel, but it seems as if you’d want to get properly away, wouldn’t you? It wouldn't be much good if you could look out the window and see your own house.”

“Probably,” said Danny, who didn’t want to admit that he’d never had a romantic night in a hotel either. He'd certainly _stayed_ in enough of them, most often recently when sent by Future Jo herself to conduct some piece of business on her behalf, but those were sixteen-hour days followed by ordering room service and falling asleep in all his clothes, which was not exactly what they had in mind for Chris and Sharon Miller. He watched Jo write _price_ and _location_ across the top of the paper in feathery, chemical-smelling blue ink, with the same handwriting he had seen on hundreds of hurriedly dashed-off notes stuck to his computer monitor or left on his desk, and wondered if you could have déjà vu about something that wouldn’t happen for another twenty years.

“Anything yet?” Jo looked up at him expectantly.

“Well, lots of these places are still there in my time, so that helps.” Danny paged through the directory. “I don’t think we’ll be sending them to Claridge’s or the Ritz. Can you copy these names and numbers?”

He read them out and Jo wrote them in a long column, and then he took the list and started working his way down it, speaking to one booking agent after another with his best telephone voice—the one Future Jo referred to as _Danny Foster, Young Professional—_ until he heard a click on the line.

“You've got another call.” He held the phone out to Jo, who took it off him, tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, and answered.

“Yes, I did. I’m better now. No, not better enough for that.” She paused, listening. “Okay. It’s fine. Yes, I’m sure. It’s _fine_. I’ll be all right. Bye.”

“My mother,” she said to Danny’s enquiring look as she pressed a button to end the call. “She's working late and then going out with her friend Susan, so we’ve got plenty of time to finish this. She’s always away until all hours when they have plans together. My dad says Susan’s a bad influence.”

“Remind me to thank Susan for that if I ever meet her,” Danny said. “Speaking of your dad though, what about him? Won’t he be coming in from work sooner or later?”

“He left for France yesterday. Some sort of business trip.” Jo drew her knees up, wrapped her arms round them and laced her fingers together. “You might be able to stay here tonight, if you want to. There’s a lock on my door, and I don’t snore like the Norsemen, at least I don’t think I do.”

“I thought you said your parents wouldn't like that.”

“Well yes, if they caught you creeping in, but you’re already here, so you won’t get caught, will you?” She worried at a frayed place on one denim-covered knee, avoiding his gaze. “That’s not the only reason I said what I said, actually. They really wouldn’t like it, but I was also using them as an excuse, at least a bit, because I wasn’t sure you were safe. I didn’t know you then the way I do now.”

“It’s only been four days.”

“A lot’s happened, though."

“That's an understatement,” Danny said. “Don’t worry, I’m not offended. You’re right to be careful about letting strangers come home with you, especially weirdos who turn up ranting about time travel.”

Jo smiled at that. “So you’ll stay?”

Danny thought about it. He could do with a quiet night, and this room was much cosier and nicer-smelling than the hostel dormitory, but the idea made him nervous. He’d met Jo’s mum several times in the future, and she was a lovely woman, but even in older age she had a flinty edge not unlike her daughter’s. He didn’t want to be caught in a battle between the two of them if she discovered him in her house.

“I might,” he said. “Come on, let’s finish these calls first.”

With Danny working the phone and Jo crossing names off the list, they trimmed the possibilities from fifteen hotels down to two, both at a reasonable but not daunting remove from the Millers’ address, and both at a price that Jo thought she might be able to coax out of her mother.

“What are you going to tell her you need it for?” He looked at the two circled names one last time and then laid the list down. At some point, the Rourkes’ rotund black-and-white cat had come sauntering into the room and made itself at home on the desk, and he had to move it aside to make space; it blinked sleepy amber eyes at him, but didn’t complain.

“Something to do with school. It’s the one thing they both always say yes to. She’ll probably make me pay her back later, but it’ll be worth it.” Jo bounced to her feet, suddenly full of energy and purpose. “I’ll ask her first thing in the morning if she’s not feeling too rough from her night out. Look, it’s getting dark already; are you staying here or not?”

Danny glanced out the window at the daylight vanishing behind the trees in the back garden, pondered the cold journey he’d have back to the hostel and the uncomfortable night he’d spend there, and decided it was worth the risk. “All right. Am I sleeping on the floor?”

“Well, you can’t sleep in my bed,” Jo said. “It’s not that big, and there’s a lot of you. Your arms and legs are just ridiculous. You’re like a scarecrow on stilts.”

“Jesus, Jo. Keep that up and I’ll need self-esteem therapy when I finally get home again.” Danny crumpled up a spare bit of paper and chucked it at her with a sidearm throw. “I’m going to tell Future You that Past You gave me a complex.”

Jo scooped up the paper ball and fired it back, hitting him square in the middle of the chest. “I wish you’d stop talking about the other me. I don’t want to think about her.”  

“Why not?”

“I just don’t, that’s all.” She folded her arms across her front in a way that warned him not to pursue this line of conversation any further, and Danny held up both hands in defeat.

“All right, all right, I won’t talk about her.” He saw Jo visibly relax and went on. “Look, we need to finish working out the details of this plan before we call it a night. I can arrange things with the hotel once we’ve chosen one and you’ve got the money, but how are we going to tell the Millers about their prize? Now Sharon’s met us both, we can’t just go and knock at the door again.”

“We could write them a letter, the way I said before,” Jo suggested, ”and have some sort of voucher made, to look more official. There’s a printing shop near my school; I walk past it all the time.”

Danny thought longingly of his laptop at home, loaded with InDesign and Photoshop, and as unreachable as if it were in another universe, which in a way it was. “All right, we'll see about that. And we’ll have to have it delivered by courier so we’ll know when they’ve got it.” He reached for the list of hotels—annoying the cat, which had curled itself into a furry circle, its delicate spray of white whiskers pointing at the ceiling, and gone to sleep nearby—and turned the page over to scribble notes on the reverse. "CitySprint will do same-day delivery, assuming they exist already." 

“What if Sharon and Chris don’t use it straight away, though?”

“That’s a good point. If they saved it for their wedding anniversary or something, we’d be waiting for months.” He twiddled the pen rapidly between his first two fingers, stippling the page with blue ink spots. “We’ll put a time limit on it, make it valid just for a weekend. And we’ll have to think of a reason for them to have won it.”

“Not much of a reason,” Jo said. “People enter raffles and competitions and things all the time without paying attention—at least my mum does—and they’ll be so pleased to have won something, they won’t spend long wondering how. We’ll pretend we’re a marketing firm. Foster and Rourke.”

“Foster and Rourke it is," Danny said. 

With their plans fully laid, they went out into the garden for Danny to stretch his legs and Jo to ruin her lungs with nicotine, and then back into the warm, cluttered kitchen, where she made toasted cheese, slightly burnt but still edible, for them both. The rest of the evening passed quickly, and before he knew it, he was stretched out on the fluffy heather rug, with one of the cushions from Jo's bed tucked under his head and a blanket of unknown provenance spread over him, as she opened her bedroom door and shooed the cat out onto the landing. 

"Out, Felix. Go on." Felix balked; Jo nudged his hind legs gently with the side of her foot, and he took a disgruntled hop and shot away toward the stairs.

"He'll stand on your face and then yowl to be let out at three in the morning if I shut him in with us," she said, closing the door again and turning the key in the lock. "Are you warm enough?"

Danny extracted one arm from under his blanket and gave her a thumbs-up. "You sure this is going to be all right? I could still leave." 

"What did I say to you about being a rule follower, Danny?"

"Don't do it." 

"Exactly." Jo switched off the lamp on her desk, and he heard the rustling and creaking of springs that meant she was climbing into bed. "It'll be fine. Even if we do get caught, I'm good at talking my way out of things, usually." 

This was exactly the brand of hubris that Danny knew was going to get her into trouble at times throughout her life, but it also fell under the verboten subject of her future self, so he let it go and pulled the blanket closer round his shoulders, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible. He hadn't lied about being warm enough, but the rug wasn't as soft as it looked and there was more dust down here than he'd expected. He felt a sneeze threatening and pinched his nose to stop it. 

"I'm not going to have to escape through the window in the morning, am I?" he asked. 

"Yes," Jo said dryly. "I'm going to weave a rope from sheets and you're going to slide down as if you're breaking out of prison." He heard more rustling, strained his eyes, and found there was just enough light in the room for him to see her roll over in bed and prop herself up on one elbow, facing in his general direction. "Don't be an idiot, of course you won't. My mum does the shopping every Saturday morning, so we'll leave together as soon as she goes. Through the front door, like normal people." 

"Just checking you've got a plan." 

"I've always got a plan."

"Always?"

"Almost always." 

After that it was quiet for some time, except for the sound of Jo's breathing, the stealthy tap of rain against the window, and an occasional creak that was probably Felix patrolling the nighttime house on a hopeful quest for mice. He was almost asleep when Jo spoke softly.

"Danny?"

"Hrm?"

"I know David said that going back to the place where you left your original timeline might help you go home—that's why we're doing all this—but did he say how it was meant to work? I mean, when we went to visit Sharon, nothing happened, did it? You didn't vanish in a flash or get sucked into a wormhole in the fabric of space-time, or whatever happened to bring you here." 

"No," Danny said, "but he also said that we'd have to replicate the conditions from before as well. I wasn't standing on the doorstep at half past ten in the morning when I left my own timeline. I was inside, in the middle of the night, asleep." 

"But there must have been something different," Jo persisted. "You've been living in that flat for almost two years, you said, and your brother lived in it alone before that. If time travel were possible every night at the same time, you'd have noticed by now. It can't have been the first time you fell asleep on the sofa." 

Danny thought about his weeks of sleeping on that sofa, living out of the holdall that had contained the sum total of his earthly possessions, until Scott finally asked him to move in properly. "It wasn't, but Jo, I don't know what else we can do. It's like the first night, when you thought falling asleep here might send me back. We've just got to try things until we find something that works." 

"I've been thinking, though." Jo got out of bed, dragging her duvet along with her, and fumbled her way across the floor to sit beside him. "What if nothing works? If you're here for good—"

"Yeah, that thought's crossed my mind as well," Danny said. "And I hope it doesn't happen, because I've got no idea what I'd do then."  

"If it did, though."

"It can't." 

"Stop arguing with me and listen," Jo said irritably. "If it _did_ , it might not be so terrible." 

"What are you saying, Jo?"

"I'm saying—I'm saying that I know you need to go home, and we'll try everything we can to get you there, but if you had to stay, you wouldn't be all on your own. It'll be a long time before I'm in a position to really help you with careers and things, assuming my own career still works out the way it's meant to, but until then, I'll be here for you if you want me. The other Jo would, wouldn't she?" 

"We agreed not to talk about her." 

"I'm declaring a temporary two-minute bye on our agreement," Jo said. "Wouldn't she?" 

"Yeah." The word came out unexpectedly thick and choked, and he cleared his throat and tried again, glad it was too dark for her to see the tears stinging his eyes. "But you don't have to just because she would. That's a big commitment to make, and you—"

"And I've thought about it, and I've decided," Jo said. Her voice had the sure, authoritative tone of utter finality that was familiar to him from their other life together, and he knew better than to contradict it.

"All right," he said. "Thanks. It means a lot." 

"Good," Jo said, and then drew a sharp, sudden breath and sneezed violently. "Jesus, Danny, you didn't tell me it was so dusty down here. You can come up and share the bed if you'd rather. I trust you."

"Really?"

"Of course really. If you were going to touch me up you'd have done it already." She gathered her duvet and stood up, and he unfolded himself from the floor and followed. "Just try to keep those arms and legs contained. I don't want to wake up with an elbow in my face." 

"No promises," Danny said. "I'm a scarecrow on stilts, remember?" 

"Oh, fuck off," Jo said, and laughed. 


	9. Chapter 9

 

Jo's bed wasn’t designed for two fully grown people to share, but after some negotiation, they worked out a compromise, with Danny rolled in his blanket and wedged between her and the wall. He was expecting it to be awkward, but she was a warm, reassuring presence at his back, and the mattress felt like fluffy clouds of whipped cream and meringue compared to the floor, and between those two things, he didn’t have much time to reflect on the weirdness of the situation before he’d fallen asleep.

It seemed he’d barely closed his eyes before he was opening them again, disoriented by yet another set of unfamiliar surroundings. Morning sunlight filled the room, spilling across the desk and onto the rug in a bright rectangle that made him squint. There was something over his mouth, stopping him making any noise, and before he could panic properly he realised it was Jo’s hand.

“Shhh.” Jo was leaning close to him, whispering. “My mum’s still here.” She took her hand away, and he swallowed with an effort—his throat was parched—and managed a husky whisper of his own.

“What time is it?”

“Past ten. I thought you’d never wake up. You must have been shattered.”

“Ugh.” Danny sat up halfway, shedding the blanket like a used cocoon. “You haven’t just been sitting here while I slept, have you?”

“Don’t get me wrong, Danny, I’m awfully fond of you, but you’re not so fascinating that I want to watch you breathe for hours on end.” Jo pushed his feet to one side and perched at the end of the bed. “I got dressed and went down to talk to Mum. I didn’t want her coming up to knock at the door.”

“Oh,” Danny said blearily. Now that he was looking, he could see she had on different clothes than yesterday: a short denim skirt with leggings underneath, and a black jumper over a white polo-neck top. A tiny gold cross dangled from a thin matching chain round her neck, giving her a vaguely nunlike look. He supposed it was a good way to head off any suspicion that there might be a strange man asleep upstairs in her bedroom. “Do you think she’s left yet?”

“Hang on, I’ll go and see.”

She got up and opened the door, and Felix, who apparently had been waiting for this moment, wove his way past her legs and came trotting into the room, the plume of his tail waving like a flag and his belly nearly dragging on the ground. Danny patted the bed, and Felix gave him an assessing look, then gathered himself and leapt up with a mighty effort as Jo slipped out onto the landing, pulling the door closed behind her.  

“Can you keep a secret, Felix?” Danny scratched the cat under the chin and got a rusty, rather reluctant purr in return. “Good. Don’t tell anyone I was here, all right?” 

Rather than dignify this with a response, Felix set to work kneading the blanket into a shape he approved of, and Danny stroked him and tried to shake off the lingering fog of sleep. After a bit, Jo came back carrying a lopsided, earth-toned mug that looked as if she might have made it in some primary-school arts and crafts lesson, and handed it to him before making herself comfortable on the bed, legs out straight and back against the wall. Felix, seeing an opportunity to abandon Danny for someone he knew better, put a tentative paw on her knee, then heaved himself into her lap and settled down.

“All clear?”

Jo nodded and rubbed Felix’s ears. “I watched her drive off. She’ll be back in an hour or two, though, so drink that quickly and we’ll go and see if the printers are open. I think they do a half-day on Saturdays. Oh, and look at this.” She felt in her skirt pocket and pulled out a handful of folded-over notes. “It wasn’t easy to convince her I needed this much for school, not to mention in cash. I’m not sure she believed me, really, but she was hungover and I think she just wanted me to stop talking. Which I may possibly have been doing very loudly, completely by accident of course.”

“All’s fair in love and time travel,” Danny said. He gazed down into the mug and wondered how she could possibly know, on less than a week’s acquaintance, exactly how much milk he liked in his tea. Did his own version of Jo know that? He didn’t think so—he was usually the one who brought her cups of tea and coffee, not the other way round—but it was a mystery he wasn’t prepared to plumb at the moment. “So, we’ll get our voucher made, type up a letter from the fictitious Foster and Rourke Ltd., and have it delivered to our victims—”

“I think ‘lucky winners’ is the term you’re looking for,” Jo said.

“Whatever. And then we wait for them to take the bait.”

“Yes,” Jo said. “And unfortunately I’ll have to go back to school like a good girl until they do, at least for a few days. I don’t think I can get away with any more skiving for a bit, and I do have exams coming.”

“Yeah, you do, and you’ve got to do well on them. The Danny who lives in this timeline doesn’t know it yet, but he’s counting on you to be a success.”

“No pressure or anything,” Jo said. “Speaking of the Danny in this timeline, have you thought of looking him up?”

“Well, he’s three at the moment, so we couldn’t have much of a conversation, unless I wanted to talk about whether the red Lego is better than the blue Lego,” Danny said. “But I have thought of trying to see my dad. I’m just not certain I can handle it. He’s not alive anymore in my timeline, and—it’s hard to think about meeting him and having him not know me. It was bad enough with you.”

“Sorry.”

“Wasn’t your fault.”

There was a brief moment of quiet, interrupted only by the low grumble of Felix’s purring, and then Jo said, “You could see him without actually speaking to him, though, couldn’t you? MPs are always visiting their constituencies, cutting ribbons and giving out prizes at schools and things. You could go and be a face in the crowd. I would, if it were my dad.”

“I don't know, it might feel even weirder seeing him that way,” Danny said. He tried a sip of his tea, found it the right temperature, and drained the mug in three long gulps before reaching over to set it on her bedside table. “Anyway, there's still time to decide, and we’ve got other things to do first. And I need a shower before we do them, or I won’t be fit to go out in public."

“Well, I wasn’t going to say, but…” Jo crinkled her nose up at him teasingly, and then let out a shriek as he grabbed her, not too hard, and threatened to push her face into his armpit. “Stop it! Get off me! Oh God, is this what it’s like to have a brother?”

“Basically," Danny said, and let her go, restraining an urge to ruffle her hair for good measure. “And I’m the little brother, so I’ve had lots worse done to me. Even now that we're grown up, sometimes. I never thought I’d miss it, but I do.” 

"Too bad for you," Jo said with immense dignity. "I'm glad to be an only child. Go wash; I’ll be out in the garden.” She scooped Felix up under one arm and slid off the bed. “You’re coming too, you furry blob. You can at least pretend you might catch a bird.”  

Danny had his shower and dressed in yesterday's clothes again, and they slid into the printer's shop just before closing, out of breath and clutching the words they wanted on their faux voucher, which he’d hastily composed in the margins of a bus timetable on the way there. He handed it over to the woman behind the counter, whose expression communicated that she’d been in the business since Gutenberg printed his first Bible and no request could surprise her, and she shoved back a form for them to fill in and said their order would be ready to collect on Monday morning.

“Isn’t there a rush service?” Jo asked, to which the woman arched an eyebrow, pencilled onto her face so aggressively that it made her look a bit insane, and said that that was the rush service, and if it didn’t suit them they were free to go someplace else.

At that point Danny cut in and said Monday morning would be fine, and a moment later they were out on the pavement, counting their money and debating whether they could afford to take a cab to the hotel they’d chosen for Chris and Sharon Miller’s romantic sojourn. Having decided they couldn’t, they spent most of the afternoon getting there, arranging things with the staff—Danny handled that part, having already spoken with them on the telephone—and then returning to the hostel, where he was relieved to find his bunk hadn’t been given away or his few possessions rifled through. He spotted Julie at a distance, sitting with two other girls he hadn't seen before, but the presence of Jo, who was busy buying cigarettes from a machine in the reception area and didn’t notice her at all, seemed enough to keep any unwanted encounters at bay.

"I've got to go soon," Jo said, returning to him with a red-and-white Marlboro packet in each hand. "And I'm going to have to leave you on your own tomorrow as well, unfortunately for both of us. My mum is dragging me to church with her and then to Sunday lunch at my aunt and uncle's. You'd hate them. They vote for the enemy party every time."

Danny pulled a horrible face, and she laughed.

"So anyway, that'll be my day. How are you going to spend yours? I'll need something else to think about when I'm trying to choke down the sprouts and not throw anything across the table." 

"Haven't decided yet," Danny said. "But I'll be up bright and early on Monday, to get the voucher and send off our message, and then I thought I'd go round to the flat and watch to make certain it arrives. Not right there, or they'll notice me and think I'm planning to break in—" 

"Which you are," Jo said. 

"Well, yes, but they're not meant to know that. I can go to the park, the one where we went after we met Sharon. It's near enough, and I'll be all right if it doesn't rain." 

"I'll come and meet you there when I can," Jo said. "Three's probably the soonest, so don't leave even if the parcel does get delivered before then, or I won't know where you've gone. I wish that mobile phone of yours worked in this timeline." 

"So do I," Danny said fervently. He'd switched the mobile on a few times after that first night in the library, either to look at his photos or just out of habit, and even though he knew it was hopeless, he'd checked every time to see if he had service and been disappointed when he hadn't. He'd been trying to leave it off since then, both for the battery and for his own peace of mind. "All right, I'll see you on Monday afternoon, then. Look after yourself." 

"You too." Jo reached up to put a swift kiss on his cheek, and then departed through the main doors, leaving him feeling strangely abandoned.

On his own, he wandered through the hostel's lounge, where a group had gathered round a battered old television to watch Colin Baker being taken hostage by some angry Daleks, then picked up an unattended newspaper and took it to a quiet corner, where he read through every page for mentions of his father. He'd only been half entertaining the notion of a visit until his conversation with Jo, but he was beginning to wonder whether he ought to take it more seriously. He knew it would hurt to be looked at like a stranger—no question about that—but he also knew there would never be another chance for him to see his dad alive again. What if he left without trying and spent the next fifty years regretting it? What if he did try and it only made things worse? 

He was still wrestling with the idea when he went to bed, only to discover that the Norsemen had finally moved on and he had a new bunkmate, a scrawny kid who looked fifteen at the most, and was bundled in a sleeping bag that smelt of a combination of wet dog and overripe onions. At least this one was quiet, he thought, pulling his duvet up over his face and trying to breathe through it. He thought of Jo sleeping peacefully in her bedroom, with Felix curled up at her feet, and imagined he was there too until he managed to drift off. 

After a long, dull, lonely Sunday, Monday finally arrived, cloudy but dry, and Danny was up and dressed and at the printers before they opened. Mad Brows was already inside, counting out money for the till, and when he caught her eye through the glass door, she scowled and made him wait an extra five minutes past the posted time as punishment for being early. Difficult as she was, her work was excellent: their voucher looked as professional as anything he'd ever had made for Future Jo, and he thanked her effusively before heading off to arrange the delivery.

With that finished, there was nothing left to do but make his way to the Millers' road— _his_  road, he reminded himself; the longer he stayed in this timeline, the harder it was to remember actually living there—and then to the park, where he settled in with another bacon sandwich and the day's papers and waited for a courier to go past. He was still waiting when Jo arrived hours later, wearing her school uniform under an unbuttoned coat and carrying her bag slung over one shoulder. 

“Oh Christ, not the uniform again.”

“Not the uniform again? How about 'Hello, Jo, I've been missing you, hope you've been well?'” Jo sat down beside him, cigarette already in hand, and fumbled in her bag for her lighter. “What's the matter with the uniform? I thought men had a thing for the schoolgirl look.”

“Yeah, if they’re creepers,” Danny said. "And I have been missing you. Yesterday was shit without anyone to talk to." 

“That's more like it. I missed you too.” She turned her head to exhale a stream of smoke away from him. “Anything on the letter front yet?”

“No, but they have until six to deliver. I did see Sharon walking past not long ago on her way home, so she’ll be there to receive it when it comes.”

“She didn’t see you, did she?”

“I hid behind a newspaper.”

Jo laughed. “You’re getting better at this cloak and dagger stuff. Maybe you ought to consider a career change when you get home. Tell the other Jo I said—hang on a minute, look over there.”

Danny looked and saw a courier’s van waiting at a crossing, the logo of the company he’d used splashed across its side. “I think that’s it. They’re going in the right direction. Come on, we can go a bit closer and watch.”

They walked to the edge of the park and a little way toward the building, and were rewarded by the sight of the van stopping illegally in the road and a man in a grey uniform getting out, carrying a stiff cardboard envelope. He disappeared up the stairs, and a moment later returned empty-handed and drove away.

“ _Yes_ ," Jo said with a gleeful clap of her hands. “So they’ve got it. Now what?”

“Now,” Danny said, “we give them a day or so to decide to use it, and then we phone the hotel to see if they have. I think that one’s for you to do; I’ve spoken to the staff there so many times they’ll know it’s me, and they’ll be more likely to confirm the booking for someone whose name is on it, so start working on your Mrs Sharon Miller impression.”

“Will do,” Jo said. “And if they have used it, and they clear out on Friday or Saturday evening the way they're meant to, then you're in." She paused. "Or are you? I remember you said you'd left your keys in your own timeline." 

“That'll be the easy bit," Danny said. "I looked at the door when we were talking to Sharon, and it’s the same sort of lock Scott and I have in the future. You can open it with a hex key."

"What's that?"

"It's a little tool that's shaped like a letter L. You know, that thing you screw together your cheap IKEA furniture with. Or have you got IKEA yet?"

Jo shook her head. "I've heard of it, but I've never been to one. They're in Sweden or something, aren’t they?" 

"Doesn't matter You don't even need a hex key really; a strong paperclip or a hair grip's almost as good. Scott’s old flatmate showed me how to do it, before he—well, he showed me. I’ll just have to go late at night so the nice people across the way don’t see me and think I’m a burglar.”

“ _We’ll_  have to go,” Jo corrected. “You don’t think I’m leaving you to do this on your own, do you? I’ve got to see you off properly and make certain you’re safe, and then lock the door again so Chris and Sharon aren’t really burgled before they come home. It isn’t their fault they happen to live there.”

"I don't know, Jo—we've got no idea what's actually going to happen, and—"

"I don't care," Jo said firmly. "I promised I'd be there for you and I meant it, so I'm going. End of discussion." She planted her hands on her hips in a pose that he knew meant he wasn't going to win this battle and might as well surrender now, and he sighed and gave in. 

"All right. Of course you can come. I'll probably be glad to have the company." 

"Good." She glanced up at him and her face softened noticeably. "Have you thought any more about going to see your dad? I'll come with you to do that too, if you like. It's another thing that might be better with company."

Danny opened his mouth to reply to that, but she cut him off.

"And I ought to start learning more about what MPs do if I'm going to be one eventually, don't you think? It'll be educational. You do want me to be ready to help the other Danny when he's older, after all." 

"That's blackmail, Jo."  

"All's fair in love and time travel," Jo said. "I heard it from a friend." 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> side note: the episode of Doctor Who that the people are watching in the hostel lounge is 'Revelation of the Daleks, Part 1,' which really did air on 23 March 1985, and apparently not just in our own timeline :)


	10. Chapter 10

After Monday’s triumph, Tuesday arrived with a downpour of rain and, for Danny, the depressing realisation that he’d now been here for a full week, as well as that he was running low on money again. The infusion of cash from Jo’s mum had nearly all gone to further their plans, and as he counted what he had left after paying for the next few days’ worth of accommodations, it became clear that he’d be living mostly on whatever he could scrounge from this point forward. His 2008 clothes were getting loose, either because he’d been having such irregular meals or because his normal alcohol consumption had dropped to nearly nil—just his luck, he thought, at a time when he really could have used a drink or twelve—and he felt a bit like the scarecrow that Jo had accused him of being.

Sighing, he ate an apple and a dry Weetabix biscuit from the picked-over selection, and then went to spend the day at the library where Jo had taken him to talk on that first afternoon, which had the triple advantage of being free, indoors, and near to St Margaret’s. He read all the day's newspapers and started in on a thick biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, and when three o’clock came, went out into the wet afternoon to meet Jo on the library’s steps. She’d walked there with a schoolmate, a petite girl with short dark hair and a narrow, intense face that seemed vaguely familiar, and it wasn’t until Jo introduced her as "my friend, Annie," that he understood why.

“I’ve met your brother, haven’t I?”

“Yup. David,” Annie said. “And you’re Daniel. How’s your book coming on?” 

“My—oh, not bad, thanks,” Danny said, remembering just in time that he’d told David he was doing research for a novel about time travel. And Jo had told Sharon Miller he was writing a book as well, hadn't she? At this rate, he thought, he might as well actually write one when he got home. He’d certainly got the material for it.

“Better hurry up or you’ll miss the bus,” Jo said to Annie in a warning tone, and Annie, who was giving Danny an amused and rather knowing look, grinned, said “See you,” and walked on, swinging her briefcase from one hand and adroitly avoiding the worst of the puddles.

“I thought you didn’t want to tell anyone about me,” Danny said, watching her go. He was trying to hunch further under the edge of Jo’s umbrella so the drips would stop going down his neck, but without much luck.

“I didn’t,” Jo said. “All I said was that I needed to ask her brother a physics question and please could I have his number. David filled her in on the rest after we met him. It doesn’t matter, though. Annie’s all right, she won’t say anything.” She looked Danny up and down, appraisingly. “How are you?”

“Starving,” Danny said. “I was ready to start gnawing at the books in there. No one would miss a few pages out the back of each one, would they?”

Jo snorted a laugh and passed him the umbrella handle. “Here, hold this for a moment.” She rummaged in her bag and produced a wrapped sandwich. “It’s still fresh. It was part of my packed lunch today.”

“Why didn’t you eat it?”

“Your wish is coming true,” Jo said, handing the sandwich over and taking the umbrella back in exchange. “I’m off the fags, at least temporarily. I can’t afford to buy them and I don’t dare ask for any more money just now. Anyway, I had my last one yesterday, and now I’ve got a headache and everything tastes like metal, including food. I think I’d rather have lung cancer in another fifty years.”

“Don’t say that.” Danny unwrapped the sandwich—it was cheese and butter, but he wouldn’t have cared if it were stuffed with sawdust and sand—and crammed nearly half of it into his mouth at one go, closing his eyes in ecstasy. “Oh fucking hell, this is so good— _unf_ —oh my God.”

“Jesus, Danny. Would you and the sandwich like to be alone together?”

“Sorry,” he managed around another mouthful.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it, just don’t _moan_ over it,” Jo said. “We need to find a phone and ring the hotel. Can you eat and walk—oh well, never mind then,” she said, as the second half of the sandwich disappeared and he licked a stray smear of butter from his thumb. “I’ll just pack two of them tomorrow, shall I?”

“Yes please,” Danny said. He thought he probably ought to be embarrassed, but he was too pleasantly full to care. “Come on, Mrs Miller, let’s go and make that call.”    

They found a phone that would let them use Jo’s phonecard to save their precious coins, and Jo cleared her throat and put on an older-sounding voice that reminded him alarmingly of the other version of her. 

“Hello, is that the reservations desk? Oh good. I just wanted to confirm my booking for the weekend. I asked my husband to make it and he’s so forgetful, you know what men are like…” She flashed Danny a wicked grin over her shoulder. “It’s for Sharon Miller, or it might be in his name, Chris Miller. Of course.” There was a pause, and then she said, “That’s exactly right. No need to change anything. Thanks very much, you’ve been a great help.” 

“Mission accomplished,” she said, replacing the handset and edging closer to Danny, who was holding the umbrella. “They’re booked in for Friday night, so we’ll have hours and hours to do our breaking and entering. What time do you think?”  
  
“Well, we’re meant to be recreating the circumstances of what happened before, according to David, and I got in at quarter past eleven that night,” Danny said. 

“When did you fall asleep?”

“Not long after. Midnightish, probably.”

“Quarter past eleven it is, then,” Jo said. A sudden sideways burst of rain whipped at them, and she huffed out an irritated noise and pushed wet hair away from her face. “Have you thought any more about seeing your dad? We’ve got tomorrow and Thursday, and Friday too I suppose.” 

Danny nodded. “He always came home at the weekends when Scott and I were kids. They're not sitting this Friday, and he'd catch the first train in the morning, so I thought if we happened to be at the station…”

“You’re going to ambush him as he gets into a train?”

“I just want to see him from a distance, Jo. That’s all.”

“All right,” Jo said gently. “We’ll see him.” 

The next two days passed in much the same way Tuesday had: Danny woke up, ate whatever was on offer, made his way to the library, and sat there reading until Jo arrived to keep him company for a few hours. He finished the Nehru biography, read half of a mystery set on a remote Hebridean island replete with sheep and murder, and then tried some books about quantum physics, but found them too dense and theoretical to give him any insight into his situation. There ought to be an illustrated _Time Travel for Idiots_ , he thought, dropping his most recent attempt off to be re-shelved. He would have liked to explore more outside the path from hostel to library—Scott would go mental when he found out that he’d been to a version of the Eighties and hadn’t even tried to sneak into a show at the Rock Garden or the Astoria—but the travelcard he'd bought soon after arriving had expired, and he was worried about getting into some sort of trouble that would keep him from his Friday night rendezvous. It seemed safest just to keep his head down and wait. He only wished he'd had his glasses on when he came here; all this reading without them was murder on his eyes.  

When the night between Thursday and Friday finally arrived, it seemed to drag on forever. The boy with the wet-dog-smelling sleeping bag had gone some time ago, only to be replaced by someone even worse than the Norsemen: a shadowy figure whom Danny had never seen in full light, but who could be heard masturbating almost nonstop for most of the hours between midnight and dawn. Jo had promptly nicknamed him The Furious Wanker upon hearing this story, and now that was how Danny thought of him as well. He lay awake, listening to The Furious Wanker’s metal bunk shaking and the occasional voice from other parts of the room pleading with the Wanker to shut the fuck up and go to sleep, and eventually the sun rose and he was able to get up and start what he hoped would be his last full day in this timeline.

Showered and dressed in his 2008 clothes, he pondered whether to take the few possessions he’d acquired with him, and decided he probably should, just to be safe; his space was paid for another night, but he’d look more normal lingering round a train station with a rucksack than without one. He loaded it up and left the dormitory—The Furious Wanker was asleep with his thin hostel-issued blanket over his head, and Danny spared a thought for the poor person who was going to have to collect and wash it eventually—and made it to the breakfast area in time to get one of the croissants, which always went the quickest. Outside, the morning was wet and chilly, but noticeably warmer than when he’d arrived: spring was struggling to gain a foothold, and for a moment he was almost sorry he wouldn’t be here to see it. 

 _Don’t be stupid,_ he told himself. It would be spring at home too, and there he’d be able to sleep in his own bed and wear his own clothes and eat as much as he liked. He’d go to Pizza Express and get a large American Hot and make himself sick with it. He’d drink all of Scott’s ridiculous hipster craft beer. Future Jo could hardly judge him for turning up to work hungover, could she? 

These thoughts occupied him all the way to the spot in the station concourse where he'd arranged to meet the current version of Jo. He'd expected to have to wait—he was early—but she was there ahead of him, pacing nervously in front of the WH Smith, with her army jacket zipped all the way to the top and her hair spilling loose over her shoulders. 

"You all right?" He touched her sleeve, and she flinched a little, but managed to muster up half a smile for him.  

"I'm fine. I didn't sleep very well, that's all. Thinking too much about things." 

"What things?" 

"Personal ones." Jo rubbed her forehead as if it hurt, and he saw she'd bitten the skin around her fingernails until it was raw and bleeding. "But about tonight too. I just wish we knew more about how the different timelines work, or why the Millers and your brother can live in that flat every day without anything happening to them. I even thought of phoning David again and just telling him everything and asking what he thinks, or looking for a book—"

"I've tried the book idea. You need a doctorate in physics just to read the table of contents." 

"I know, it's just—" She clenched her hands into fists in a familiar gesture of frustration. "I'm meant to be clever. I know how that sounds, but I _am_. I hate not understanding things." 

"Maybe after tonight we'll both understand a lot more than we do now," Danny said.

"Maybe," Jo said. More people were starting to stream from the forecourt into the concourse, heading toward the trains that would carry them to work and school and families, and he drew her aside, wondering if he was taking his life into his hands by touching her again when she was in a mood like this one.

"Are you sure you're all right? Don't take this the wrong way, but you seem awfully tense." 

Jo stared at him with burning hot eyes, then sighed and looked down at the ground instead, kicking the toe of a boot distractedly at someone's crumpled and discarded chocolate wrapper. "You're not wrong. I think it's the giving-up-smoking thing. I've been climbing the walls since Tuesday—Annie swore the first three days would be the worst, but this is the fourth day and I'm still ready to crawl out of my own skin. I can't be too cross with her, though; she's my cover story for tonight. She volunteered when I mentioned I was going to be with you."

"Er," Danny said, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. "She doesn't think we're...does she?" 

"I said not, but I don't think she believed me. She was practically turning cartwheels at the idea. Said it’d do me good, even if you are a bit old. Which you are." She glanced back up at him, a quirky little smile playing round her mouth. "She's a cheeky one, Annie. Want to know what else she said about you?" 

"I'm afraid to," Danny said, and she laughed. 

"Never mind. We're here to see your dad, aren't we? Do you know which platform he'd be going from?" 

"Yeah, this way." 

They found a corner near the ticket barriers where they could stand out of the main flow of foot traffic, and watched as a flood of people passed by, weighed down with rucksacks and briefcases and wheelie bags, their voices and footsteps serving as counterpoint to the announcements booming over the tannoy like the voice of God, if God's voice were rather echoing and occasionally incomprehensible. Their clothes didn't look like costumes anymore, Danny realised; he'd spent days feeling as if he were wandering through a never-ending film set, and now all the shoulder pads and hideous haircuts seemed perfectly ordinary. Just as in his own timeline, all the men in suits tended to blend together into one anonymous, suited man, and that was how he nearly missed the only person he wanted to see. 

He barely knew it was his father at first; the man he remembered was older, greyer, and fleshier than the one in front of him, who looked eerily like Scott and was probably within a few years of Scott's age in their own timeline. A vague memory fluttered across the screen of his mind's eye—something about being taught to swim during a rare family holiday, looking down into a face like this one as he was lifted up high to be dunked underwater—and then it disappeared as his dad paused, feeling in his trouser pocket for something that turned out to be his ticket. Having found it, he glanced up, and for a split second Danny thought he was going to speak, but his eyes were blank, perhaps a little puzzled at the sight of a dishevelled young man watching him hungrily from a distance. His gaze slid over Danny and landed on Jo, who was surveying the crowd beyond him, looking without really knowing what to look for, and then he kept walking, through the barrier and toward his platform, on his way home to his two little boys. 

"Danny? Danny!" Jo pulled hard at Danny's arm, and he dragged his attention back to her. "What's the matter? Have you seen him?" 

"He was just there." 

"Where? Has he already gone?"

Danny nodded. "He didn't know me. I knew he wouldn’t, of course. But the thing is...I didn't know him either. I recognised him, but the way you'd recognise an actor or a newsreader if you saw them in a train station. He didn't feel like my dad at all." 

"Oh," Jo said softly. "Oh, Danny, I'm sorry." 

"It's all right." 

"It's not all right." She reached up and laid a hand on his cheek, exactly the way her alternate future self sometimes did, and he bit his lip. There was a terrifying witch's brew of emotions seething inside him: disappointment at having seen his longed-for father as a stranger; affection for Jo, who was doing her best to help despite her own struggles; and deep, bitter loneliness for his brother, who was the only other person in any timeline who really would have understood how he felt. 

“No, it’s not,” he said.

"I know," Jo said. She took her hand away and put an arm round him instead, leaning into his shoulder, and he rested his chin on top of her head for a moment. 

“I’m ready to go home,” he said, somewhat muffled by her hair, and above them, as if in reply, the tannoy squawked " _We are sorry for the delay."_

They went back to the Rourkes' empty house so Jo could pack a bag to preserve the fiction that she was sleeping over at Annie's—she might go there for the second half of the night anyway, she said, if things went as planned—and then tried to fill the rest of a day and evening that crawled along even more slowly than the night had. It felt like preparing to leave on a long trip, Danny thought; when it was too late to start anything new and too early to go to the airport, and all you could do was sit with your suitcase and wait. Jo was pale and unusually quiet, but insisted she was fine every time he asked, until he finally saw he was upsetting her and stopped asking. It wouldn't be much longer anyway, he thought; she'd feel better once he was gone and she could get back to a normal routine.

At last the time had passed, and at eleven sharp they were climbing the steps to the Millers' flat, walking as quietly as possible so as not to attract attention. It was pitch black on the landing, and as Jo came up to join him, she stumbled a little and he caught hold of her arm to stop her falling backward. 

"Thanks." She was barely whispering, but it still sounded loud enough to wake the dead, making him cast an anxious glance at the door of the neighbouring flat. "Why's it so dark?" 

"Light's burnt out. It usually is, even in my time. Hang on."

He fumbled his mobile out of his coat pocket, flipped the case open and pressed the power button. Jo looked like her own ghost in the screen's faint glow, all big dark eyes in a white face, but she was intent on the job at hand. From her own pocket, she produced a small grip-seal bag full of thick 50-mm paperclips, opened the top, and offered it to Danny, who chose a clip and straightened it as much as he could. 

“Hold the phone right here, next to the lock,” he said softly to her, and she took it and did as he’d asked. “Okay. Fingers crossed.” 

He slipped the straight end of the paperclip into the keyhole and angled it, feeling for the tumblers in the lock the way Jake had taught him—would teach him, at some point in some timeline or other. They were newer and stiffer than he remembered, and for a moment he thought it might not work, but then he felt the click of the last one falling into place, past and present and future coming together, and he turned the handle gently and pushed the door open. They were in.


	11. Chapter 11

They slipped through the gap quickly, before anyone noticed, and from force of habit, Danny automatically turned the deadbolt on the inside of the door to lock it. Someone had left a small lamp switched on in the entryway, casting just enough soft rose-toned light for them to see, and the air smelt faintly of whatever the Millers had been cooking before they set out for their evening away.

“Chicken Kiev,” Jo said, indicating an empty box protruding from the top of the kitchen bin.

“Wonder if they’ve left us any.” Danny unshouldered his rucksack, took Jo’s bag off her, and tucked them both under a chrome-and-glass table lined with collectible snow globes from various holiday destinations.

“Come on, I’ll give you the tour. This’ll be Scott’s room right over here.” Jo followed him; he flipped the light switch, and they both looked in at an unmade double bed, with two dresses that Sharon had apparently considered and rejected during the packing process tossed onto it. “And this one’s my room, or it will be eventually.”

“They’re definitely not planning to have kids anytime soon,” Jo said, regarding the heaps of overstuffed cartons and bags, the desk stacked with paperwork and old textbooks, and the disused-looking set of barbells and weights under the window. “You’d lose your baby in here and never find it again.”

Danny snorted a bit weakly. He hadn’t expected seeing his own room to be any more jarring than the rest of the flat, but standing here gave him an eerie feeling, as if he’d died and was haunting his former home. For the first time, he considered whether Jake might be drifting about the version of the flat in his own timeline, trying fruitlessly to communicate with him and Scott, and the back of his neck prickled with ice. He’d never believed in ghosts, but then he’d never believed in time travel either and that had turned out to be pretty fucking real, hadn’t it?

He jerked the door shut with a bang, as if to sever that line of thought at its root, and Jo flinched and glanced up at him, startled.

“Bloody hell, Danny, I think they might notice if they come home and their door’s broken, don’t you? Are you all right?”

“Course I am. Come on, let’s go see what’s up in the living room.”

He was hoping to find something out of the ordinary—a swirling vortex, a portal to another dimension, a flashing neon sign that said TIME TRAVEL HAPPENS HERE—but all looked as he remembered it from the morning he’d woken up on the sofa, not that he’d been at his most observant just then. The fireplace surround was the same dark wood he knew from the future, but the photos on the mantelpiece were different: a formal wedding photo of the Millers, a curly-haired toddler who was probably Sharon as a child, romping with a puppy on a sunlit lawn; an old black-and-white snap of a group of people who were smiling bravely despite their thin, shabby wartime look.

He ran a finger along the spines of records and books on the shelves, touched one of the lily-shaped glass shades on the lamp, and then turned back and found Jo watching him with a face full of some unidentifiable emotion.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She tucked her hands into her pockets. “What do we do now?”

“Well, according to David, we try to make it as much like that night as we can, and then…I think we just sit down and wait for something to happen.”

"Okay," Jo said, and then looked stricken as a new idea seemed to occur to her. "Oh no. I only thought of it just now, but is me being here going to stop that something from happening? I wasn't before."  

Danny considered that. It was true he'd been alone, but now that they were here together, he didn't want to send her away and face this all on his own. He could tell himself it was to avoid hurting her feelings all he liked, but the truth was that he was shit-scared and needed a friend. 

"We'll try it with you here first," he said, "and if nothing happens, then I'll try alone. That's a more scientific approach anyway, isn't it? Altering variables to test the effect, or something like that? What do you think?" 

"I think it sounds like you trying to rationalise things, but I want to stay, so I'm not going to argue." Jo glanced round the room in the low light. "Should we have another lamp on?" 

"No, this is just about right. Where's the remote, though?" 

“The remote?”

“The remote control?" He mimed pointing and clicking. "I can't switch on the telly without it." 

Jo’s forehead scrunched up in a combination of exasperation and impatience, as if she were dealing with a small, rather slow child. She crossed the room and pressed a square silver button on the front of the box, and the screen filled with cold, crackling grey-and-white static.

“Oh right, I forgot I was living in the Dark Ages," Danny said, and Jo turned on him with a frown.     

“Don't get too cheeky, future boy. You're not home and dry yet, in case you haven't noticed." 

"Sorry," Danny said, abashed. "I'm just nervous. I don't like not knowing what might happen." 

"That makes two of us," Jo said. "I've felt sick all day, thinking about it. I might still be sick really. There's something to look forward to, hey?" She turned back to the screen. "Anyway, now that we've got the Dark Ages technology working, what do you want to see?”

“Well, I was watching the news…”

“You’ve missed it for tonight.” She twisted the tuning dial, which made a heavy _tock_ sound as it landed on each setting. “You can have the late film or something foreign. How’s your French?”

“Nonexistent. What’s the late film?”

Jo clicked back through the channels and watched for a moment. “ _The Day the Earth Stood Still_. Depressed French people or robots, your choice.”

“Robots,” Danny said. He moved aside a pile of—he hoped—clean washing on the infamous pink flowered sofa to make room for sitting, and Jo took the matching armchair to his left and sat poised at the edge of its seat, still wearing her coat, with pent-up tension vibrating in every line of her body.

“You may as well relax," he said. "This could take hours. You can’t just sit and stare at me for that long to see if I disappear.”

“I suppose not,” Jo said. There was a brief silence while on the screen, a door in the flying saucer slid smoothly open and Klaatu emerged in his disco jumpsuit and helmet, looking like a 1950s prototype for Daft Punk. From the corner of his eye, Danny could see Jo fidgeting, worrying at the ragged skin round her nails, and then she spoke again.

“This feels weird, Danny. It’s too normal. I mean, not the being in someone else’s home bit—I don’t like that at all—but we’re just sitting here watching a robot shoot laser beams from its eyes. It shouldn’t be that ordinary, should it?”  

“That’s how it was before, though,” Danny said. “Just normal and ordinary and boring. I thought I’d go to bed, read a little, and then head off to work the next day, the way I always do." He paused. "What's that sour face for?” 

“You’re not making me very excited about my future in politics, that’s what." Jo drew her feet up underneath her and gazed at him moodily. "If it's just going to an office and coming home every day and then doing it all over again, then I might as well be an accountant or an insurance adjuster or a barrister like my dad. I want to actually make a difference in the world somehow. To make life better for people." 

“You will,” Danny assured her. “You’re amazing at what you do. And the work's never dull—there’s always something new happening or a crisis to cope with. I love it and so do you; the best job in the world, that’s what you call it. Just trust me and you'll see. You do trust me, don't you?" 

"I wouldn't have gone breaking and entering with you if I didn't."  

"Well, then," Danny said. "Anyway, you shouldn't take what I do with my free time as an example. I'm an old man, at least according to my brother. He'd get on with your friend Annie; they could both tut at us and tell us we don't get out enough." He nodded toward the television screen. "Don't think about it right now. Watch this bit, this is where the little boy takes the alien on a tour of the city." 

The clock crawled along to midnight and then past it, and eventually Danny discovered that in a world without Sky and Virgin, broadcasting really did stop at a certain point every day. After the film ended, there’d been a brief weather report, a soothing voice had wished him a good night on behalf of everyone at the Television Centre, and then there’d been nothing but music over a blue globe logo, followed by more static. The flickering screen unnerved him somehow, and after some reflection he realised it was because it reminded him of _Poltergeist_ , with the spooky blonde girl kneeling in front of the set and intoning _They’re heeeere_. It was an image Jo likely would have recognised as well, if she'd been awake to see it. Instead, she'd abandoned the armchair long ago to curl up next to him on the sofa, and was asleep with her head resting against his shoulder and her coat spread over her like a blanket. A few strands of her hair stirred gently every time she exhaled.

Danny wanted to join her—he’d slept fitfully at best for most of the previous night, no thanks to The Furious Wanker, and his head felt stuffed with cotton wool and angry bees—but he was afraid to, even though it was in his sleep that he'd made the mysterious leap to this timeline. What if something happened that was different to the last time, and he missed it? Worse, nothing might happen at all, and they could both sleep too long, only to be caught by the Millers returning. But Chris and Sharon wouldn’t be anxious to wake up at the crack of dawn on a Saturday morning and abandon their cosy hotel room, would they? They'd want to laze about, order breakfast, indulge in a round or two of early-morning sex; all the things he'd have wanted to do himself, if only he had someone to do them with. 

Maybe he'd just close his eyes for a moment or two, he thought, just to take the edge off his fatigue. He wriggled into a more comfortable position, and Jo stirred and sat up halfway.

"What's happened?" 

"Nothing yet. Go back to sleep." He fumbled around on the sofa for a loose cushion to use as a pillow, but Jo was more alert now and grabbed him by the elbow. 

"No, Danny, something feels wrong. Wake up and pay attention." 

"What is it?" He tried to force his leaden eyelids apart with minimal success. 

"I don't _know_ ," Jo said, with a note of desperation creeping in. "Just something. It's like—like when you're waiting on the airport tarmac to take off, and the pilot turns up the cabin pressure, and it feels like a weight on your chest, as if the air's too heavy to breathe. Don't you feel it?" 

Danny rubbed both his hands over his face, trying to clear out the cobwebs. He still had the sense of whirling vertigo and confusion that he'd assumed was fatigue, but underneath it he could feel what Jo was talking about: a stifling pressure as if a colossal balloon were slowly inflating, squeezing his lungs, making him frantic to escape. The already-dim light seemed to fade even further, filling the room with a murk through which he could only just see the white static-filled square of the television. 

"You've got to get out—go—" He pushed Jo away hard, but she caught at his arm again, fingers clenched round the sleeve of his coat like the unyielding metal hands of the robot in the film they'd watched. 

"Wait—" 

Before she could finish her thought, there was a massive sideways jolt, like a ride at a funfair malfunctioning, and he felt the whole world shift around him with a sickening wrench, upside down and back to front. The last of the light went, and he was left blind, helpless in a void where his only connection to anything was the soft surface underneath him. Even Jo's grip on his sleeve was gone, torn away in the violent upheaval. 

Slowly, the disorientation passed, but not the darkness. He knew he was still indoors from the slightly stuffy atmosphere and the smells—plaster and paint, the sharp malty scent of beer, the faint aura of rubbish needing to be taken out—but that was all. His only other immediate sensation was a warm, oily nausea so strong that it made him frightened of opening his mouth. If this was time travel, he thought, he was glad he'd slept through it on the first go-round. 

“Danny,” Jo said beside him. Her voice was smaller and younger-sounding than he’d ever heard it. “Danny, I think I might have made a mistake.”

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

Danny fumbled around in the dark and found that Jo was closer to him than he’d thought, only a hand’s breadth away, and blessedly warm and real and alive. At the same time, he discovered that the surface beneath them wasn’t the smooth cloth of the Millers’ sofa, but something thicker and tougher and grainier, and a spark of hope flared up inside him.

 _Please let it be_ , he thought, and reached out, blind and groping, for where a lamp ought to be. He nearly knocked it over on his first try, but found the switch and clicked it on, and felt a huge, intoxicating rush of relief as the light illuminated Scott’s familiar flat—the leather sofa, the orderly rows of DVDs, the metal EAT and DIE signs screwed to the green-painted wall—and at his side, Jo looking wide-eyed, horrified and utterly out of place, and bringing him crashing back down again.

“Fucking hell, Jo.” He ran a hand through his hair distractedly. “Why did you grab me? What were you thinking? I was trying to keep you safe.”

“I just wanted to say one last thing to you before you went.” Jo’s dark eyes were glossy with tears, but she was making a valiant effort to hold them back. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t know it would. Is this the right time? Your time?”

“I think so.” Danny stood up on wobbly legs, crossed the room, opened the door to his bedroom and looked in. “All my stuff’s where it ought to be. Scott’s not here, but he wasn’t here when I left, so that’s all right.”

“Then you’re home? We did it?”

“Yeah,” Danny said, feeling a grin spread across his face despite everything. “We did it. I’m home. But you—”

“I know,” Jo said. She’d lost her coat at some point during the confusion, and he saw she was shivering; as usual, the flat was Arctic without the heating switched on at full force. “What are we going to do about that?”

“Ah…” As the temporary elation faded, he sensed he was about to experience a scaled-down version of the panic attack he’d had upon finding himself in 1985, but he quashed it and thought hard. “Okay, it’s going to be fine. We’re safe here, no one’s going to come back and catch us, so all we’ve got to do is wait for the whatsit to happen again and you can go home too, right? No problem.”

“But will it take me back to the point where we left?” Jo pushed up the grey knitted sleeve of her jumper and looked at her watch. “It was the middle of the night there. It’s only half past seven here. Suppose I appear at the wrong time and the Millers are at home?”

Danny was suddenly seized by a horrible thought. He fished his mobile out of his pocket, marvelling at the fact that it had now survived two leaps between timelines—he ought to write a letter to Vodafone and tell them he had an advertising campaign idea for them, he thought—and pressed the power button. The screen flashed into life, and after an interminable minute of booting, the device connected to the network and he saw a full signal indicator for the first time in longer than he liked to remember. And—

“Shit,” he said.

“What?”

He turned the display so she could see it too. “It says it’s the fifteenth of April, 2008. I left here on the seventeenth of March.”

“That long?” She frowned over the numbers. “Could it be wrong?”

“I don’t think so. It pulls the time from the provider’s network, so it could have been wrong when I wasn’t connected, but not now. Hang on, I’ll try again.” He powered the phone down again, and they both watched as it rebooted with the same time and date, bright white against the black background. “How can that be? Even if time was still passing here when I was away, I’ve been in your timeline for twelve days, not almost a month. Although it is still a Tuesday for some reason.”

Jo bit her lip, looking even paler than before. “I think I know why. David said that there was slippage between timelines, didn’t he? That’s why you ended up in 1985, because when you jumped or transferred or whatever it’s called, you landed on a different point on my timeline than the one you left on yours. It’s the same thing again, only this time we’ve gone forward instead of back, and not as much.” A visible shudder ran through her, and she wrapped her arms round herself. “We’ve been so lucky, Danny, completely by accident.”

“Lucky how? We’ve come back later than we should have.”

“Because, Jo said, “if the slippage is random, we might have gone a lot farther into the past, or the future.”

Danny considered that and saw what she was saying. “Centuries, you mean.”

“Or millennia. Think about it. What was on this spot ten thousand years ago, or a hundred thousand? What’s going to be here long after we’re both dead and gone? What would’ve happened if we’d arrived in the middle of an ice age? Or a nuclear winter?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Neither do I.” She swallowed hard. “I think I really am going to be sick. Where can I go? It wasn’t on the tour, before.”

“First door on the left.” Danny pointed in the right direction, and she disappeared into the bathroom and closed the door firmly behind her, leaving him to stand in the middle of his own living room and look at it as if he’d never been there before. It was quite a lot less orderly than the way Scott usually liked it kept, he noticed, especially considering that he hadn’t been here to leave his dirty trainers all over the place. He wanted to believe that Scott would have been pleased to have his flat to himself again, but he knew he wouldn’t be, any more than Danny himself would have been if Scott had evaporated off the face of the earth for a month.

At a loss for anything else to do, he picked up the scattered newspapers and organised them into a pile, then collected two glasses, a crumb-strewn plate, and a bowl with the gluey remains of cereal stuck to its sides, and carried them into the kitchen to soak in the sink. He still felt shaken and a little queasy, but having a task helped to settle him, and somewhere at the back of his mind there was an idea that Scott might be less pissed off if he came home to a recently tidied flat. It was stupid, and at some level he knew it, but it was all he had at the moment.

“All right in there, Jo?” he called toward the bathroom, and Jo made a muffled sound of affirmation on the other side of the door.

"Okay, just shout if you need anything." He turned to fill the kettle, thinking he’d have some tea ready for her when she was finally finished, but before he could do any more, he heard a telltale shuffle and jangle of keys on the outside landing, and Scott pushed the door open and came in, bringing a gust of fresh, green-smelling air and a scatter of raindrops with him.

At first glance, he looked just as he always did when he came in from work, with his wool overcoat buttoned up and his laptop bag slung over one shoulder, but on closer inspection Danny could see he looked haggard and poorly shaven, as if he hadn’t been sleeping well. He felt he’d never loved his brother so much, even with these imperfections marring his smooth façade, as he did at this moment; after two weeks of thinking he might never see Scott again, he couldn’t look at him enough. He stood there frozen, not knowing what to say or do, and then Scott glanced up from his iPhone and his face contorted into a nearly impossible expression of shock.

“Danny?”

“Yeah,” Danny said. It seemed inadequate to the occasion, but it was all he had.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Scott dropped his bag on the floor right where he stood, heedless of the computer inside it, and closed the distance between them in three long strides of his black Ferragamo wingtips. “Are you hurt?”

“No, I’ve just been away—”

“Away?" Scott said, blankly. "That's all? You _idiot_.” He was staring, as if unable to believe what he was seeing. “You—you—”

“I can—” _Explain_ , Danny meant to say, but before he could get there, Scott grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard, the way he’d done years ago when they’d been kids and he’d caught Danny messing about in his room, only with ten times the strength. His head snapped back and forth with the force of it, and he thought if it went on much longer, he might end up heaving his guts up right next to Jo.

“Stop,” he groaned, and Scott left off shaking him, but retained his brutal grip, as if he were reserving the right to go back for a second round.

“What’s happened to you? You look like hell. Are you sure you’re not hurt? Ill?”

“No, I’m fine, it’s just—it’s a long story.”

“Well, then you’d best start telling it now, hadn’t you?” Scott finally turned him loose, leaving him to rub at numb spots that were certain to bruise spectacularly later, and took a step back. “I thought you were fucking _dead_ , Danny, missing for weeks and weeks like that without a word to anyone. I’ve been frantic, and you don’t even want to know what state Jo’s been in. Have you spoken to her?”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean, not exactly?”

In the bathroom, there was a flush, followed by the sound of water running briefly into the sink, and then it shut off and Jo opened the door and emerged, looking white and weak, and blotting at tears and snot with a crumpled handful of toilet roll. She noticed Scott and came to an abrupt halt at the same moment he turned round and saw her.

“About Jo,” Danny said. “I’ve got something to tell you.”


	13. Chapter 13

“I don’t believe it.” Scott was pacing, head in his hands. “Come on, Danny. This is bullshit.”

“Why would I make something like that up?”

“I don’t think you’re making it up, I think—I don’t know, that you and this girl took some rubbish drugs together and you’ve been passed out somewhere, hallucinating that you were in the past. Jesus, Danny, I know I was difficult about hooking you up when you asked before, but if I’d known you’d do something this stupid, I’d have at least found you some halfway decent stuff.”

“It’s not drugs.” Jo spoke up from where she sat, perched on one of the tall stools behind the breakfast bar. “It’s true. I didn’t believe it either when he told me, not at first, but it is.”

“Look, no offence, but I don’t actually know you, so maybe you could just stay out of this discussion between me and my brother.” Scott glared at her, but even a younger Jo was up to a challenge, and she answered the glare with a fierce one of her own.

“ _Actually_ , Scott, I don’t know you either, but I do know your brother, and if you cared about him half as much as he cares about you, you’d at least give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Yeah? Well, not that it’s any of your business, but it’s because I do care about him that I’m not going to encourage him in—in whatever this is. He obviously needs help, and you probably do as well, but you’re not my responsibility, and thank fuck for that.”

“Stop!” Danny held up his hands, feeling like a referee at a rugby match. “We don't have to do this. Where’s my laptop?”

“It’s in my room.”

“Why’s it in there?”

“Why do you think? I’ve been going through it, trying to find some sort of clue where you might have disappeared to.” Scott turned on his heel, went into his bedroom and came back with the open laptop balanced on one hand. “Here. What do you want it for?”

“To show you some evidence. Oh, Google, you beauty, you don’t know how much I’ve missed you.” Danny typed keywords and punched Return. “Lucky for us Jo’s a public figure, this ought to be easy.”

“What ought to be?” Jo leaned over him to see the screen. “Jesus! That’s my school photo from two years ago. How did you get it?”

“Never mind right now. Come here, Scott. Look at this—” Danny clicked the photo to enlarge it, and they all had a gander at Jo in her full St Margaret’s kit, smiling a bit uncomfortably into the camera. “Now look at her. See? Same girl, two years older.”

Scott glanced from the image to Jo and back again. “Yeah, she looks like a younger version of Jo.”

“And?”

“And you know how they say everyone has seven people in the world who look exactly like them? Congratulations, you’ve found one of Jo’s seven people. Only six to go.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not the one who’s being stupid here,” Scott said. “The fact that this girl looks like Jo in no way proves that she’s from the past, or an alternate reality, or whatever the fuck you said it was. You know what the most likely explanation is? At some point twenty or so years ago, Jo had a baby and placed it for adoption—she would have been a student at the time, wouldn’t she, just the age for that sort of accident to happen—and then she went merrily on with her life.”  

“She didn’t. Clem was her first. She was pissed off because they wrote ‘elderly primigravida’ on her chart at the doctors.”

“Ouch,” Jo said softly at Danny’s side.

“Okay, maybe it’s not that,” Scott said, “but whatever it is, it’s still not time travel. End of.”

Danny was beginning to understand Scott’s impulse to shake him when he’d first arrived. He felt like doing some shaking of his own, and if they’d been alone he would have tried, but mindful of Jo’s presence, he gritted his teeth and tried to be very cool and logical about it all.

“All right, so a photo’s not enough. Let’s ask her some questions.” He turned to Jo. “What’s your full name?”

“Joanne Rourke.”

“Middle name?”

“Elise.”  
  
“When were you born?”

“Twenty-first of February, 1967.”

“This is all stuff you could get off the web in twenty seconds,” Scott said. He turned away and opened the fridge, as if bored with Danny's stupidity. "It doesn't prove anything." 

“Okay then. Ring Jo up and ask her about some piece of information that only she would know. Something from when she was a kid. That’s how I convinced this Jo that we knew each other in the future. Or just put them together and let our Jo talk to her for five minutes. If anyone would know, she would.”

Scott stopped perusing the contents of the fridge. “Are you still high? You can't let the real Jo see her." 

“Sorry,  _what_?” Jo was up off her bar stool like a shot, nearly upending it in the process. “I am the real Jo, thanks very much. Or at least  _a_  real Jo. I’m just as real as she is, at any rate.”

“I know you are,” Danny said, and sighed. “But it might really be a bad idea for the two of you to meet. I know she'd believe it once she'd seen you and spoken to you—she'd have to— but think how you’d react in her place.”

“I’d cope with it,” Jo said flatly. “Just like I’ve been coping with it for the last twelve days."

"You only had to cope with the idea of time travel," Danny pointed out, "not with your alternate self turning up and wanting to chat." 

"She can take it," Jo said. "We’ve both done more than our bit on this one, Danny. It won't kill her to share part of the burden."

Danny turned to Scott, who was halfway down a bottle of lager and already eyeing up a second one. “Where is Jo, actually? Our Jo, I mean.”

“She’s at home. This is her night to have her son, and she said she can’t miss even one of them or that twat Iain’ll use it against her.” Scott drained the rest of the bottle and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “She’s been blowing up my phone, though, asking if I’ve heard from you yet. You might want to check your messages; I know she’s tried to reach you dozens and dozens of times.”

“Yeah, funnily enough the reception wasn’t great in the past,” Danny said. He was feeling uneasy about having frightened grown-up Jo; if he knew her, she was likely to let that fear out as rage when she finally clapped eyes on him. “Look, will you stay here with this Jo while I go and see the other one? I can't take her with me and I don't want to leave her on her own.”

“Oh Christ, you’re not really going to tell our Jo this story, are you? She’ll have you in a psych ward by morning.”

“Not yet,” Danny said. “For now I just want to show her I’m all right.” He inclined his head toward Jo. “Will you look after her or won’t you?”

“Yeah, all right," Scott said, and slapped him on the shoulder—unnecessarily hard, Danny thought. “Good luck. You’ll need it. And for fuck’s sake don’t just turn up at Jo’s door; she’ll have a stroke. Call first and tell her you’re coming.”  

“Thanks.”

“Thank me later. Sort yourself out first.” Scott tossed his empty bottle into the recycling, took another from the fridge and disappeared into his room. As soon he was gone, Jo clutched urgently at Danny’s arm.

“I don’t want to be left alone with him. I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t, not just now,” Danny said. “It’ll be all right. I know Scott’s being a pain in the arse, but he’s my brother. He’s not going to hurt you.”

“I’m not afraid he’ll hurt me. I just don’t want to be here without you. Please, Danny. What if something else happens?”

There was real pleading on her face, and it made his stomach clench up with guilt, but what could he do? No matter what this Jo thought of her counterpart’s ability to cope with sudden shocks, the idea of asking her to accept both his reappearance and the existence of her own doppelganger at the same time didn’t bear thinking about.

“Look, I wish I could take you with me, and I swear I’ll find a way to show you to my Jo and tell the whole story, but just for now you’re going to have to make the best of things. You can stay in my room—whatever it is that happens, it can't extend much past this immediate area, or half the building would have vanished by now, in both timelines. Just shut the door and read a book until I come back. Okay?”

“Fine,” Jo said, resentfully. “Don’t let the other me keep you too long, though.”

Danny promised he wouldn’t, knowing full well that Future Jo (or were they Current Jo and Past Jo now?) would keep him just as long as she pleased, and there wouldn’t be a thing he could do about it. He got the young version of Jo settled in his room, after a quick sweep to hide the dirty clothes he'd left strewn around the floor the last time he'd been there, then sent a text message to the other Jo and set out to receive what he was sure would be a thorough bollocking, possibly coupled with the loss of his job if she was angry enough. 

Here in 2008, Jo had the ground floor of an old house that had been chopped up and converted into flats—when he'd helped her move there, he’d asked if she was certain it was safe, and she’d told him sharply that she was a grownup and knew how to look after herself—and it was a short walk from the cab up to her front door. He was prepared to knock, but she’d seen him coming through the window, and before he could lift his hand, she opened the door, pulled him in and closed it behind him, all in one motion.

“Danny, oh my God.”

“I’m sorry,” he began, but before he could say any more, Jo reached up and grabbed his face with both hands, so hard it hurt, and then dragged him down into a tight embrace, which was something she'd only done in the past when she was drunk. She was thinner than the younger Jo and smelt of a different soap and perfume, but with her arms round his neck and her hair against his cheek, he knew, really knew down at some deep, previously untapped level, that they were different versions of the same person. 

After a long minute, she took a step back without letting him go completely, and looked him up and down. Just as he’d seen grown-up Jo in her younger counterpart, he could see the ghost of eighteen-year-old Jo peering at him out of this version’s face, and it made him feel disoriented, as if the world were splitting in two, doubling and redoubling. At the same time, he couldn’t help noticing that Jo looked even worse than Scott had—blanched and drawn, with puffy circles of exhaustion underneath her eyes—and felt a fresh stab of guilt at knowing he was probably the cause of her condition. 

“Where’s the baby?” he asked, hoping to distract her.

“It’s late, Danny. He’s asleep, and I would be too, if I hadn’t spent the last month of evenings sitting here, wondering if someone had killed you and dumped your body in a skip.”

“I know. I’m an idiot. Scott already told me.”

“ _Idiot_  is putting it mildly.” Jo drew a long, deep breath and pushed her hair back, in a gesture he’d recognised on young Jo and now recognised again in the opposite direction. “Would you like to tell me where you’ve been?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” Her voice had the brittle, glassy sound it got when she was being deliberately calm, and Danny winced, knowing that this was usually the prelude to an explosion.

“It’s complicated. Really complicated, and I swear, I swear I’d tell you if I could, but...I just can’t. I will," he added hastily, seeing a dark shadow cross her brow. "I promise I will, just not right now." 

He was expecting Jo to tear into him, and she might have done, but just then Clem emerged from the half-open bedroom door behind her, dressed in Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas and dragging a well-loved blue blanket, and forcing her to choke off whatever she might have been about to say. 

"Danny's here?" Clem was bright-eyed, intrigued by the arrival of a late-night visitor and the possibility of playing when he ought to be in bed; he knew Danny as someone who would race toy cars and have mock wrestling matches and toss him up in the air, all activities that must have seemed more enticing to a two-and-a-half-year-old than sleeping. Danny, for his part, had never been so pleased to see Clem, who served as an effective diffuser of almost any volatile situation just by existing. 

“Yes, Danny’s here.” Jo scooped him up, blanket and all, and settled him on her hip.   

“Why?”

“Just to say hello. Ssshh. Lie down.” Clem obediently laid his head on his mother's shoulder and parked his two middle fingers in his mouth for sucking, but his big dark eyes, so like hers, stayed fixed on Danny as if hoping Danny might do something interesting.

"It’s all my fault,” Danny said, before Jo could work out how to read him the riot act in a baby-appropriate tone. “I don’t blame you for being cross.”

“Cross doesn’t begin to cover it. If I weren’t so glad to see you alive, I’d murder you myself. I thought—” She stopped, apparently at a loss for words, and then said, simply, “I thought I’d lost you, Danny. Don’t ever, ever do something like that to me again.”

“I won’t.” He paused. “You probably reported me missing to the police, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did, because you  _were_  missing. You’d have done the same if I disappeared, too, so I don’t want to hear any moaning about it. You may have forgotten that you were ready to have the river dragged the one time you couldn’t reach me for half a day, but I haven’t.”

“Okay,” Danny said meekly. “I’ll report myself un-missing tomorrow.”

“I’ll give you the number for the detective sergeant I’ve been speaking to. He’ll probably be glad to see the back of me; I’ve been breathing down his neck for weeks.” Jo shot him a hard stare over the top of Clem's head. “He’ll ask where you’ve been as well, so start thinking now about what you’re going to say to him, and don’t think you’re off the hook for telling me, either. I’ll let it go for now, but only because I’m so relieved you’re here and in one piece.”  

“I really am sorry, Jo. I’ll make it up to you.”

“Make it up to me by not repeating it,” Jo said. “And by being in the office first thing tomorrow morning. Do you want to stay here tonight? We could get an earlier start that way.”  

“Best not,” Danny said, thinking of young Jo at home, waiting impatiently for him to return. He’d forgot how much work his own version of Jo was: he was fairly certain that one of the reasons he didn’t have a girlfriend was because she was the dominant woman in his life, filling up every corner of it not only with the actual tasks she gave him, but also with her habit of phoning him late at night to ask him a question, or remind him to do something the next day, or to talk for a few minutes about nothing much (the latter type of call had increased since her divorce, and he suspected her of being lonely and refusing to admit it). How was he going to survive two of her?

“Well, suit yourself,” Jo said, and smoothed her son’s fine, sleep-damp hair. “He’ll probably be up for hours now, but I’ve got to at least try to settle him. I’ll see you bright and early then, won’t I?”  

“You will.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Course it is.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” Jo said. “Say goodnight to Danny, Clem.”

“Night Danny,” Clem said, popping up to offer a cheery wave and a little gap-toothed grin that didn’t bode well for going back to sleep.

“ _Hours_ ,” Jo said, giving Danny an agonised look, and saw him to the door.

It was close to midnight when he finally got home, and as he went upstairs, he had the same eerie sense of doubling he’d felt when talking to Jo, remembering that he’d done this exact thing with the younger version of her in the other timeline only a few hours ago. He imagined all the timelines there must be, lying side by side like the sketch of motorways multiplied by infinity, and all the different things that were happening at different points on them. In one timeline they were going upstairs together to pick the lock on the Millers’ door with a paper clip; in another timeline he was climbing the steps alone; in a third timeline perhaps he didn’t live here and had never met any version of her at all. For just an instant, he felt his subconscious mind trying to make a connection—something they hadn’t thought of—but then he was at the top of the stairs and it was gone.

He unlocked the door, with his key this time, and went inside to find his brother sprawled out on the sofa in the semi-dark, one eye on a televised boxing match and the other on the glowing screen of his iPhone.

“Did you get sacked?” 

“Not this time,” Danny said.

“Still got all your vital organs?”

“Yeah. How’s everything been here?”

“Fine,” Scott said. “She hasn’t put so much as a toe out of your room. I knocked and asked her if she wanted anything to eat or drink, but she said no.”

“I’ll look in on her.” He tossed his coat over the back of a chair, hesitated. “I wish you wouldn’t sit there like that.”

“Why?” Scott drew it out long and sarcastic, with a curled lip and an arched eyebrow, and Danny grimaced.

“Because there’s this _thing_ that happens and I don’t know why, and I don’t understand it, and—and I don’t want it to happen to you as well.”

“For God's sake, Danny. I’m going to say this one more time, with small words to get it into your thick skull. _Time travel is not real_. I’ve been sitting on this sofa every night for the last twenty-eight days and nothing’s happened. Nothing’s going to happen tonight either, or tomorrow night or next week or ten years from now. You’re cleverer than this. I don’t know if it’s whatshername in there who’s been filling your head with all this rubbish, or if having sex for the first time in far too long has blown some sort of circuit in your brain, but—”

“I’m not—” Danny lowered his voice to an indignant whisper. “I’m not sleeping with her. For lots of reasons, the main one being that she's  _Jo_ , more or less.”

“Yeah, we’ve been through that already, and I still don’t believe it,” Scott said. “But I do believe that _you_ believe it. That’s why I’m asking.”

“What are you saying?”

“Oh, come on, Dan. You’d whip it out for our Jo in half a second if she said she wanted it, you know you would.”

“I would not, and she didn’t say she wanted it. She didn’t say she didn’t want it either,” Danny added, seeing where Scott was about to take that comment. “I asked her for help getting home, and she helped me.”

Scott snorted. “I’m sure she did.”

“Fuck you, Scott.” He picked up a cushion from the sofa and smacked his brother hard across the chest, eliciting a grunt but not doing half the damage he wanted to do. “I don’t know why I missed you so much. I’m going to see how Jo’s doing. Stay out of my room.”

“No fear.” Scott aimed the remote and raised the volume on the boxing to an ear-assaulting level that diminished only slightly as Danny slipped into his room and shut the door. Inside, he found the younger version of Jo sat cross-legged on his rumpled bed in the low light of the bedside lamp, wearing her own grey jumper with a pair of his flannel pyjama trousers, folded over and rolled up tightly at the waist to make them fit. She looked so like, and at the same time so unlike the Jo he’d just left that he had to shake his head to clear it.

“You all right?”

Jo nodded. “I found something to read. Why is it so loud out there?”

“Scott’s got a strop on. Are those my socks?”

“Mine weren’t warm enough.” She laid her book face-down on the bed—it was the one with the sex-in-the-mosque scene that had caused such an uproar the previous year—and wriggled over to one side so he could sit. “How’s the other Jo?”

“Pissed off at me, like Scott, but glad I’m not dead, also like Scott. She says I’ve got to be at work first thing in the morning, so you’ll be on your own during the day. I’ll give you the spare key so you can go out if you like.”  

“I know where there’s a park to sit in,” Jo said, a faint smile twitching up the corner of her mouth.

Danny laughed, feeling calmer for the first time since he’d walked in the front door. “The bacon sandwiches haven’t changed, either. Just be careful, all right? I know you can look after yourself in your own time, but this isn’t your time. Crime’s about the same, but there’s more traffic and more people and—it’s just different, so mind how you go until you’re used to it.”

“I’ll be fine.” She curled up against the pillows and absentmindedly put a finger to her lips, and he reached out and stopped her before she could bite down.  

“You’ll make it bleed again." 

Jo pulled a face. “It’s the smoking thing. I don’t know what to do with my hands now, or my mouth for that matter.”

“Thank fuck Scott didn’t hear you say that,” Danny said. “I’ll buy you some gum tomorrow. I’ve got to stock up for the other you, anyway. I wonder if that’s why she always wants it. I've never asked.”

“Thanks.” Jo inspected the sore, nibbled edge of her thumb. “That’s a small problem, though. What about our big problem? I’m not going through the time shift and just hoping I end up in the right place. Even if it’s not hundreds or thousands of years, which it could be, if I go a few months too far in one direction I’ll miss my exams, and in the other there’ll be two of me in my house. I don’t think my mum and dad will be keen on that.”

“That’s if the time shift even happens,” Danny said. “Scott just reminded me that it doesn’t always; he’s been living here the whole time I’ve been away without a hint of it. I don’t get why at all.”

“I might have an idea of how to find out,” Jo said. “But I’m not certain yet, and I’m too tired to think any more about it just now. We've had the hours between seven and midnight twice in a row tonight, don't forget. I didn’t want to go to sleep until you were back, but I can’t stay awake much longer.”

"All right." Danny stood up, went to the wardrobe and pulled his old sleeping bag down from the top, shaking it to dislodge dust. “I’ll go and sleep on the floor in Scott’s room.”

“What for? We’ve slept in the same bed before. Nothing happened.”

“I know, but Scott's going to be weird about it, and I’m not in the mood for that. And neither of us ought to sleep in the living room, just to be safe, so that’s the only other option.” He paused, sleeping bag tucked under his arm, and looked at her, realising she was still paler than normal. "You're not feeling sick anymore, are you? He said you didn't want to eat." 

She shook her head. "I'd been a bit off all day, and that jolt when we came here just put me over the edge. I'm all right now. Are you sure you won't stay? There's a floor here too, you know." 

Danny wavered—he'd been looking forward to sleeping in his own bedroom again for days and days, and he didn't particularly want to be bunkmates with his brother at the moment—and then gave in. "Maybe if I leave the door open." 

"If that's what you've got to do." She folded up the book and put it on his bedside table, and then pulled back his duvet and crawled underneath. "Why do I feel as if we've done this already?" 

"Probably because we have," Danny said, shoving a pile of old magazines aside with his foot so he could lay out the sleeping bag. Perhaps Scott was right and he ought to do more tidying, he thought. "Give me a pillow. No, that one's the good one, you have it. I'll take the other." She tossed it to him, and he caught it and held it for a moment instead of lying down. "Are you missing home?" 

"I'm worried about my parents mostly. I'll have disappeared there the way you did here, won't I?" She rolled over, bundled in duvet, and looked up at him with the same eyes he'd seen on both Clem and the other Jo earlier. 

"Yeah," he said ruefully. "I don't think there's anything we can do about that." 

"I hate to do it to them. We don't always get on, especially me and my dad, but I'm their only child and they do love me. We'll have to work faster than we did in my timeline, Danny. I can't leave them wondering for weeks if I'm dead or alive."   

"We will," he promised. "It's different now. We've got money, for one thing, and we won't have to creep about sending letters and making anonymous phone calls and breaking into flats. If I could get home in twelve days with the resources we had, we can work out the technical difficulties and get you home in half the time, or less." 

"I hope so," Jo said, and reached over to switch off the light. 


	14. Chapter 14

Returning to work in the morning was surreal, in large part because it was so outwardly normal. Their office was without an intern at the moment, and Jo had been getting by in his absence on patched-together assistance from other MPs’ researchers, but they’d only had time to address the most critical issues, and there was a massive backlog waiting for him to deal with it the moment he walked in the door.

Jo herself was tied up in meetings for hours on end, leaving him to sort through the mess on his own and simultaneously worry about the younger version of her, who he’d left in his room that morning with Scott’s old iBook on her lap and a piece of toast in one hand. He’d shown her how to operate the trackpad and open a browser window, and she’d been clicking through web pages at lightning speed, apparently intent on viewing the entire Internet in one day. He hoped she hadn’t stumbled across too much porn, or if she had, that it hadn’t been anything too weird. His own search history wasn’t exactly pure, but God alone knew what was lurking in Scott’s.

Toward early evening, as he was thinking she’d need some clothes—at least his credit card worked here and she wouldn’t have to wear castoffs destined for the charity shop—it occurred to him that they’d left his borrowed rucksack and her overnight bag in the flat in the other timeline, which had probably caused some confusion when Chris and Sharon came home. Or had they come home yet? The more he thought about it, the more unsure he was of whether things were happening in the past or present or future, or whether everything was all happening at the same time everywhere. He pictured the infinite timelines lying side by side again, shining golden ribbons rippling across an endless inky void, and the image made him so dizzy that he had to rest his head in his hands and close his eyes.

“Danny?”

“What?” He started and jerked upright to find the older version of Jo in the doorway, staring at him as if she thought she might need to summon an ambulance.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” he said defensively.

“I didn’t think you were.” Jo came the rest of the way in, and before he could stop her, she’d laid her hand on his forehead in a motherly checking-for-fever gesture that made him squirm. “Are you feeling all right?”

“Absolutely tops.” He gave her his best Fearless Researcher grin. “It’s been a long day, that’s all.”

“For you and me both,” Jo said. She looked at the clock on the wall over his head. “Have you eaten anything?”

“Haven’t had time.”

“I’ll take you for a meal if you like. You look as if you need it, and it’d be a chance for you to tell me a bit more about things. You choose the restaurant.”

“Ah…” Danny scrambled for an excuse. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to spend time with this Jo, who was good company as well as a lavish buyer of wine and coffee and cake when she treated people to dinner, but he didn’t want to leave the other Jo alone for too much longer. “I’d love to, but I’ve got to get home. I...told Scott I’d help him with something.”

“I see,” Jo said, in a tone that hinted she didn’t see at all and thought he was being deliberately difficult. “Well, that’s all right, then. Maybe tomorrow instead.”

“You’ve got a late appointment at the chiropractor tomorrow, and it's already been rebooked twice. You won’t get in for months if you cancel again.”

“Friday then,” Jo said. “Put it in the diary as tentative. No—make it definite, actually. If I don’t block off the time it won’t happen.”

That was exactly what Danny had been hoping for, but he dutifully entered the appointment anyway and printed out the next day’s entries as Jo disappeared into her office, returning in a minute or two with her coat on and her bag slung over her shoulder. She paused at his desk on her way to the door, and for an instant he thought she was going to kiss him on the cheek the way younger Jo did sometimes, but she only looked at his computer screen and nodded in approval when she saw he’d done as she asked.

“Goodnight, Danny.”

“Night.”

“Don’t wear yourself out helping Scott.”

“I won’t.”

“Hmm,” Jo said, and left.

Danny waited ten minutes and then another ten, just to be certain she’d gone—she was a fast walker, but also frequently got waylaid in the corridors by people wanting to talk at her about some pet project or cause—and then packed up his things at light speed and headed home, trying to make the mental shift from one Jo to the other along the way. By the time he arrived, he’d been working at it long enough not to be surprised by the sight of younger Jo sat on the same stool at the breakfast bar where she’d been last night, with the ends of her fingers swathed in plasters she must have found in the bathroom cupboard, and the now-plugged-in iBook still open in front of her.

“You haven’t been on that thing all day, have you?” He pulled a multipack of peppermint gum out of his coat pocket and put it on the bar top beside her. “Here, this should help save your hands.”

“I did go out for some air earlier, just to the park and back.” Jo unwrapped the gum and popped two pieces into her mouth. “But I’ve been busy with this as well. You didn’t tell me there was so _much_ of the Internet.”

“It’s one of those things you’ve got to experience for yourself,” Danny said. “Nothing weird’s been going on here, has it? No disturbances like a timeline shift might be about to happen?”

Jo shook her head. “I was frightened to come out of your room for a long time, and then when I did I tried walking round the whole flat to see if anything seemed off. I was ready to bolt out the front door if I felt so much as a twinge, but it’s dead quiet everywhere.” She tapped a few keys on the iBook. “I have found something interesting, though. Come and see it.”  

Danny put down his bag and slid onto the stool next to hers, and she turned the screen to show him what looked like a university’s website. “Right here.” She pointed at a small photo of a middle-aged man with receding dark hair, wire-rimmed specs and a blue striped button-down shirt under a lab coat. His crooked, self-conscious smile revealed a chipped front tooth.

“David Keating, Professor of Theoretical Physics, Head of Quantum Matter, Fellow of—bloody hell, it’s Annie’s brother, isn’t it? The one we met in the café.”

“Got it in one,” Jo said. “Well, it’s the David who lives in this timeline, anyway. I got the idea to look for him last night.”

“He seems to have done all right for himself,” Danny said, scanning the rest of David’s qualifications, which were impressive-looking and also mostly incomprehensible. He was beginning to wish he’d stuck with physics for longer at school, but then it wasn’t as if he’d known he’d be dealing with this sort of situation one day, was it?

“I’d say so. And listen to this.” Jo scrolled down, clicked a link as if she’d been using the Internet all her life, and brought up a list of publications with long, complicated titles. “ _Waveforms and wormholes: exploring artificial intelligence-supported modelling of temporal probabilities,_ by Dr David Keating. What does that sound like to you?”

“Time travel,” Danny said.

“Time travel,” Jo confirmed. “He did seem interested in it, even then.” She glanced up from the screen, and its blue light caught the angles of her cheekbones in a way that made her look even more like her other self. “I think we ought to pay him a visit, don’t you? He helped in the other timeline, and in this one he’s had twenty years to learn more about his subject.”

“He’s also had twenty years to decide that time travel is theoretical and not real."

“He’d better prepare to have his mind blown, then,” Jo said. “How can we convince him, though? I’d never met him before that day in the café, just heard Annie mention him now and again, so I haven’t got any secrets to use.”

“We’ll just have to tell him the truth and hope for the best,” Danny said. He drew the iBook closer and opened up a blank message form. “Not in an email, though, or he really will think we’re delusional. I wonder if he’d be any more likely to meet with us if I told him I was your researcher—the other you, I mean. Your name does open doors, sometimes.”

‘That’s a funny thought. I’m not used to being anyone important.” Jo took her gum out of her mouth, folded it tidily into a scrap of paper and stood up to throw it in the bin. “When are you going to ask to meet him? I know I was in a rush last night, but this morning when I was still lying in bed, I realised if I can work out how to go back to the same time we left, it won’t matter how long I stay here. It could be a year and no one would miss me.”

“We’ll try for tomorrow,” Danny said, typing as he spoke. “If I can convince the other Jo to let me slip away for an hour or two, that is. She keeps looking at me as if I might disappear again at any moment. Speaking of which, I need you to help me work out what to tell her about where I’ve been. We’re having dinner on Friday night—she had me put it in her diary, just like a formal appointment—and I won’t be able to put her off any longer. I told the detective sergeant I'd had a sudden personal emergency and it was private, but she's not going to accept that.”

“Don’t make something up,” Jo said. “If she’s as much like me as she’s meant to be, she’ll know you’re lying and she won’t be happy about it, so tell her the truth, the same as David, and be done with it. I’ll tell her for you, if you like.”

Danny pressed Send on his message. “I thought you didn’t even want to talk about her. Why do you want to meet her all of a sudden?”

“There are things I need to ask her,” Jo said, rather vaguely. “Are you finished with your emailing? How long does it take to get an answer?”

“Probably not until tomorrow at the soonest, depending when he checks it, which gives us tonight to go out and do a bit of shopping for you. You can’t keep wearing my socks.”

“I like your socks,” Jo said. “But I do need a few other things. I wish I had that bag I packed when I thought I was sleeping over at Annie’s.” She chewed at her lip, looking troubled. “It doesn’t make sense. I left the bag in this flat, just over there where they had that glass table, and it’s not here, but it feels as if it _almost_ is, if you know what I mean. As if that other version of the flat is just around a corner, or on the other side of a wall, and if I knew how I could reach into it and take the bag back.”

"I know," Danny said. "I’ve been having that feeling as well. I keep imagining all the timelines side by side, nearly touching each other. It makes my head spin, but I can’t stop thinking about it. I hope the David in this timeline can explain.”

"That makes two of us," Jo said. "Now let's go buy some knickers." 

"Please," Danny said, pained, and she laughed and pulled him towards the front door. 

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

Dr David Keating, it turned out, was a prompt correspondent. By the time they got in from shopping, loaded down with bags of clothes for Jo and a box of takeaway pizza they'd picked up along the way, he’d already replied to Danny’s email with one of his own.

“He seems awfully pleased you asked,” Jo observed, reading over Danny’s shoulder. “ _Temporal probability modelling is something of a niche pursuit of mine and I rarely receive enquiries about it. I look forward to meeting you and learning more about your interest in the topic._ Well then.”

“He couldn’t have suggested a better time to meet, either,” Danny said. “The other Jo’s got an appointment to have her back adjusted, and she’ll have to leave directly from her last meeting of the day for it, so I can go early. Will you be all right finding your own way and meeting me there?”

“Easy peasy.” Jo turned away, flipped open the black-and-white patterned lid of the pizza box and frowned at the contents as if wondering where to start. “I hope he listens. The only person we’ve told the whole truth to so far is your brother, and well, that wasn’t exactly a success. I keep waiting for him to say I’ve got to go.”

“He won’t do that, and if he does, I’ll go with you. You never abandoned me in your timeline; I’m not going to abandon you in mine. We’re in this together to the bitter end.”

“That’s sweet, Danny. Ominous, but sweet.” She gave up on the box and sat down on the bar stool beside his. “Are you answering David’s message?”

“Yeah, telling him we’ll see him tomorrow and thanks in advance for his help,” Danny said. “And you’d better claim some of that pizza for yourself now, because as soon as I’m finished, I’m inhaling whatever’s not on your plate. I’m starved.”

“You’re always starved.”

“There’s a reason the other Jo’s planning to corner me over dinner on Friday.” He closed his laptop. “She probably thinks I’ll go into some sort of carbohydrate-induced trance and tell her everything without meaning to.”

“I thought you were going to tell her everything anyway.” Jo put a slice of pizza on her plate, considered, added a second one, and then looked up at him, eyes narrowed. “You _are_ going to, aren’t you? You’ve got to.”

“I am. I promise. I’ve just got to work out how to do it so I don’t sound like a complete madman. Scott thinks I’ve lost it, but he’s my brother, so I don’t have to worry about what he’ll do. The other Jo actually controls my career, and if she decides I'm not competent—”

“She won't do anything to hurt you," Jo said firmly, and cut and ate a bite of pizza as if to punctuate her statement.  

“You don’t know her.”

“I do know her. I _am_ her. Remember what I said the first day we met David? I might change with time, but not so much that I wouldn’t recognise myself anymore. I’m not always as patient with people as I ought to be, but I wouldn’t destroy someone’s entire future just because I thought they were talking nonsense. Not if they were a friend." She saw the sceptical look on his face and scowled. "I wouldn’t, Danny. And neither will she.”  

There seemed to be nothing else to say, so that was where they left the subject. After a second night spent stretched out on the floor of his bedroom, Danny got up, leaving Jo still asleep in her nest of duvet, and went off to face the other Jo, who was embroiled in an argument over the dangers of asbestos ceiling tiles in schools and spent most of the day in her office, speaking sharply about it to people on the telephone. He saw her at noon, when he delivered her lunch to her desk, and then not again until she was on her way out to her five o’clock appointment, still on the phone and too distracted to do anything but give him a cursory wave goodbye.

As soon as she’d gone, he closed up shop and set off through a fine drizzle to meet the 2008 model of David Keating at the university where he did his teaching and research. The building that housed the physics department was a long, narrow, ugly one that had probably been very modern when it was built fifty years ago, and he found young Jo waiting for him there, just outside a set of double doors that led to a tall, glassed-in central atrium trimmed with blond wood panelling and railings. She had on the black puffer coat they’d bought the night before, topped off with a familiar shade of pink lipstick that she must have acquired on her own, and looked ready to take on at least a dozen physics professors.

“Told you I’d find it,” she said as soon as she saw him.  

"All right, you win, you're an independent woman." He pressed the button on the side of his mobile to check the time. "Come on, our meeting's on the fourth floor in five minutes. Mustn't keep the Head of Quantum Matter waiting.”

When they found it, David’s office was relatively large compared to some of the broom cupboard-sized ones they’d glimpsed on their way through the corridors, but so stuffed with overflowing bookshelves that it felt cramped anyway. The only wall that wasn’t taken up by books or a window was painted a sickly yellow and sported a large whiteboard filled top to bottom with equations Danny couldn’t begin to make sense of. Overhead, one of the fluorescent tubes in the light panels buzzed and sputtered intermittently, as if on the verge of going out. It wasn’t a welcoming atmosphere, but David seemed not to notice, coming round the corner of his desk to shake hands and offering them each a chair before sitting down himself.

Danny wondered briefly why he recognised this arrangement, and then realised it was the same way they’d sat at the café with the younger David in 1985, right down to the quicksilver raindrops on the windowpane behind him; all that was missing was a sandwich on a plate and Jo’s packet of Marlboro Lights. Thinking about it made the doubling sensation sweep over him again, and he only vaguely heard David asking what had sparked their interest in temporal modelling, and Jo answering that it was a long story and they hoped he would hear them out.

“Danny?” Jo touched his arm, and the sudden connection to something real cleared his head a bit. “Do you want to begin, or shall I?”

“I ought to,” Danny said. “It did start with me, after all.”

They took it in turns, with Danny telling how he’d arrived in 1985 and gone to Jo for help, and Jo filling in with her own perspective: how she hadn’t believed him at first, the way he’d convinced her, the theories they’d tried out and dismissed. David listened intently and made affirmative noises, as if they were confirming things he already knew, and when they reached the point where they’d consulted with the other version of him, he said, “Stop a moment,” and gave Jo a long, assessing look.

“You got my name from my sister?”  

Jo nodded. "In 2008 I’m Joanne Porter, member of Parliament, or so I’m told. In 1985 I’m Joanne Rourke, and I’m a friend of Annie’s. We’re at school together. Or maybe we were at school together. I can't keep it straight anymore.”

“I know,” David said. “She was proud of you, always followed your career in the news.”

“Was?”  

“She died a few years ago,” David said. “Car crash. I'm sorry to have to tell you.”

“Oh,” Jo said softly, and fell silent, leaving Danny to pick up the thread of the conversation. He could hear her breathing, light and ragged, and wanted to offer some sort of comfort, but David was already questioning him again.

“What did this other version of me say to you?”

“He said…” Danny tried to remember the exact words the other David had used. “He said it was like motorways. Different motorways that split off and run parallel to each other, and some people thought it was the act of travelling in time itself that caused the split. I’ve still got the drawing he did for us.” He fumbled in his coat pocket and found the torn-out page from Jo’s diary, which he’d folded up and put there absentmindedly on his way out of the café on that wet afternoon in 1985. He handed it over to the current version of David, who opened it, looked at the sketch and snorted to himself.

“It’s lucky I was good at maths. I was never going to be an artist in any timeline.”

“Is it right?” 

“Well, it’s simplified, but as an explanation for laypeople, it’s not bad.” David traced one of the pencilled lines with his finger. “The difference is that on a motorway the exits are fixed; they’re there all the time and anyone can use them. In space-time, they’re more like weaknesses, places where you _could_ exit if the circumstances were right, only they’re not always, if you see what I mean.”

“Wormholes," Danny suggested.

“That’s one name for them,” David said. “Ludwig Flamm called them white holes, and Einstein and Rosen described them as bridges. I’ve referred to them as wormholes in my research because that’s a term people recognise. They’re generally quite unstable, and they can collapse at any time, or blow out from the size of a pinpoint to the size of a planet and back again, or heal themselves completely and disappear.”  

“So that’s why my brother never noticed anything wrong, or the Millers—they’re the people who live in our flat in the 1985 timeline—because the wormhole isn’t there all the time, or it's too small to detect?”

“That would be my guess,” David said. “You said the other David told you to go there and recreate the circumstances that existed at the time you made the first shift between timelines, correct?”

“Yes,” Danny said. "Jo and I did our best, once we'd got in. The only difference was that she was with me. Is that what made it happen again?"

“Might have done. Might not. Either way, the David you met was giving you the best advice he could based on what he knew at the time. Or knows, I should say, because time isn’t a line; he’s still there right now, exactly as you met him.”

“I had that feeling the other night,” Danny said. “That everything’s happening everywhere, all at the same time.”

“It is," David said. "And new timelines are being created all the time as well, and that’s a problem for both you and Joanne.”

"Why?" Jo hadn't said a word since David broke the news of his sister's death, but this seemed to bring her back to herself. In the space between the armrests of their chairs, out of David's line of sight, Danny felt her reach for his hand and lace her fingers into his. "Why is it a problem?" 

“Because," David said, "you’ve almost certainly created an additional timeline by coming here. Before this, we were dealing with two timelines: the one Danny came from and the one that split off when he made the initial jump. If Danny had gone back alone, the empty place he left in his original timeline would have been filled, and nothing would have changed. But you came with him, and that act created a third timeline where this version of you exists in 2008.”

“Hang on a minute,” Danny said. A slow, cold fear was creeping over him, covering his whole body like inexorably rising water. He gripped Jo's hand, grateful for the simple human contact. “Are you saying I’m not really home yet? Because I _have_ been missing from this timeline. My brother and Jo, older Jo, both said I’d been gone for nearly a month. If this isn’t the timeline I disappeared from, shouldn’t there be another one of me here that didn’t travel there?”  

“I think I get it,” Jo said slowly. “The timeline where we met and the one we’re in right now both split off the original timeline, but at different points on it. When the second split happened, there wasn’t a version of you in that timeline because you were in my timeline, with me. Is that right?” She looked at David for confirmation, and he nodded. “So you were missing in this timeline because you were missing in the one it's based on, and now you’re here, but you’re still not there.”

Danny groaned. “So what do we do about it? Even if we can get you back to your right place and me to mine, then I’ll disappear from this new timeline and there won’t be another Danny to replace me. At worst, the Jo and Scott who live here will think I’m dead all over again, and at best they’ll have to accept that I’m gone and never coming back, which isn’t much different.”  

“Not necessarily,” David said. “If you could collapse the two 2008 timelines together, then the younger version of Jo could go back to her timeline, where it’s 1985, and you could go back to yours. This timeline would cease to exist.”

“Wouldn’t that be like killing everyone who lives in it?”

"No." David reached for the sheet of paper his other self had drawn on, which he'd set aside earlier atop a stack of other papers. He turned it over, took a mechanical pencil from a plastic cup full of odds and ends on his desk, and then drew a reverse version of the split motorways, with two thin lines coming together into a single, thicker one. "If you could collapse the timelines, then the versions of people in this timeline would merge with their other selves there. They might have a few odd moments where a conflicting memory from the short time they existed as separate entities popped into their heads, but they’d dismiss it and go on.”

“You’re joking,” Jo said. “I wouldn’t dismiss a random memory of something that had never happened to me.”

“Wouldn’t you though?” David pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Have you ever woken up from a dream that seemed so real you weren’t sure whether it had really happened or not? Or maybe you’ve got a childhood memory that no one else remembers, but it feels just as true as any of your other memories?”

“I’ve got one of those,” Danny said. “We went to Brancaster once when I was eight or nine, to see the shipwreck on the beach, and I remember nearly drowning in the sea there. Scott and I had been told we couldn't go in swimming, only paddling near the shore because of the currents, but I went out too far and was caught, and only just managed to get free. It was so vivid—my head going under, water up my nose, thinking I was going to die—but afterward my parents swore it had never happened. My dad said it was probably something I’d dreamt, or seen on television, and my brain just took it and stored it away until I thought it was real.”

“Do you mean to say that timelines collapse all the time without anyone noticing, and we’re all just sort of composites of our different selves?” Jo looked at David as if she were willing him to say no. In the corridor outside, a door banged shut and someone called a muffled goodnight to someone else; the building was beginning to empty out for the evening. 

“It’s a strong possibility,” David said. “But even if it's true, it wouldn’t work that way for you and Danny in this case, because both of you are out of your proper places; there’s no version of you back in your 1985 timeline at the moment, and there’s no version of Danny in the original 2008 timeline—we’ll call it 2008-A for clarity’s sake. If 2008-A and 2008-B collapsed into a single unit, there wouldn’t be another one of Danny in his own timeline to merge with, so he wouldn’t have two sets of memories, just the one. For you, it would just be another timeline shift, and your memories would remain intact and unbroken, the way they did when you came here.”

“Christ,” Jo said. She let go of Danny's hand and picked up the sketch, examining the lines on one side of the page and then the other with an unhappy frown. “This is a lot to get your head around all at once. I’m never going to complain about revising for an exam again when I get home. If I even do.”

“I’ve got a question,” Danny said to David. “Your modelling is for predicting where one of these weaknesses is likely to occur, isn't it? If it's just a software program running inside your computer, how can it affect anything in the real world? How could you collapse two timelines? And what about the lag that makes timelines not match up? I went twenty-three years into the past the first time and a month into the future the second; who knows where Jo might end up if we tried to send her back." 

David grinned, revealing his chipped front tooth and suddenly looking much more like the young, eager version of himself they’d met in 1985 than the sober middle-aged professor. "I'll show you some of the things the program does, if you like. But first, I'd like you to show me where all of this has been happening."

"The flat."

"Yes, please," David said. "Just wait a moment and I'll collect a few things from the lab." 

"Scott's going to _love_ this," Jo said in an undertone as David stood up and headed for the door, and Danny groaned again. 

"Don't remind me,” he said.

 


	16. Chapter 16

Danny was apprehensive about what sort of esoteric equipment a physicist with an interest in time travel might need to fetch from his lab, but when David returned, he was carrying a handheld device in a sleek graphite case, about the size and shape of a deck of cards, and an ordinary-looking laptop with a Dell logo.

Jo eyed the former warily. “What’s that?”

“This?” David held the device up. “It’s a reader for detecting dark matter—that’s a form of non-baryonic matter, which basically means it’s not made of the same particles as ordinary matter, like trees and buildings and people. Officially, dark matter’s never been directly observed and we only suspect that it exists—at least that’s what you’ll be told if you Google it—but unofficially it’s a well-documented phenomenon. You need it to have a stable wormhole, so where you find it, the probability of a wormhole existing is higher. The reader will tell us if there’s any lingering around in the area where your timeline shifts occurred.”

“Did you build it yourself?”

“God, no. I’m terrible with hardware. One of our postgraduate research students knocked it together last year to use in the lab. Really brilliant woman, Priya. She made two so we’d have a spare. Shall we?”

David gestured toward the door, and they stepped out and waited as he locked up and stuffed the key ring into his trouser pocket. The main overhead lights had been powered down, turning the corridor into a shadowy tunnel punctuated by squares of light in the glass door panels of staff working late, and full of echoes from their hard-soled shoes on the scuffed tile flooring. It all seemed a bit creepy to Danny, who was still trying to assimilate the idea that this world that looked identical to his own was really a carbon copy of it. Weird and unsettling as existing in Jo’s timeline had been, at least things there had been different enough to make it clear that he wasn’t at home. He hadn’t thought that was a plus at the time, but apparently it had been.

They took a cab back to the flat, where Scott was exactly as pleased to see them as Jo had predicted he’d be. He said hello and shook hands politely enough, but the moment David wandered off to set up the laptop and power on the reader, he grabbed Danny by one arm and steered him into the kitchen, with Jo following hard on their heels.  

“Look, I haven’t made too much fuss about you having a guest to stay, and she’s been all right so far, but inviting Doc Brown over there to come in and take readings, whatever the fuck that means—that’s a red line, Danny.”

“Who’s Doc Brown?” Jo asked.

“I’ll explain later.” Danny turned to Scott. “He’s not like that. He’s a qualified physicist. You can look him up online. He does research on this sort of thing.”

“Time travel.”

“Temporal probabilities,” corrected David, overhearing them. “I haven’t got an H.G. Wells time machine with a lot of funny dials and levers, if that’s what you’re thinking. If you’d like to come and have a look at the screen, I’ll be happy to show you what the waveform models look like.”

“I’m all right, thanks,” Scott said gruffly. To Danny, he said, “Look, I’m sleeping at Ashika’s tonight anyway, so do what you’ve got to do, but this is going to be the only time this happens. I’m serious, Danny. And when I come home, you and I are going to have a proper sit-down talk about your mental state. I haven’t told Mum—”

“Good. Keep on not telling her. She doesn’t need to know any of this.”

“Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we? She’s got a right to know if her baby boy’s gone off his trolley.”

“She’d only mind if it was going to embarrass her in public,” Danny said. “As long as I’m quietly, privately insane, she won’t care and you know it.”

Scott grunted at that, disappeared into his room for a few minutes, and returned carrying his laptop case and a black nylon holdall. “I’ll be back tomorrow evening, and there had better not be anyone here except you, and I suppose Mini-Jo if you haven’t sorted her out yet.”

Danny glanced over at Jo, who was pretending to ignore their argument by watching David work, and then back at his brother. “Yeah, okay, see you then. Enjoy yourself. And don’t tell Ashika whatever you do, the other Jo will have your hide if the opposition start saying her researcher’s lost it.”

“He’s warming up to me. I can feel it,” Jo said when Scott had gone. “I’m going to send him a card at Christmas. ‘Dear Scott, thanks for barely tolerating my presence in your home. With love from Mini-Jo.’ Do you think he’ll like it?”  

“He’ll be over the moon,” Danny said. “What’s David doing in there?”

“No idea. He’s been pressing buttons and typing lots of numbers though, so it must be something scientific.” She got up and opened the fridge. “Would Scott burst a blood vessel if I drank his extra-special beer?”

“Yes. Drink the cheap stuff instead, it’s mine.”

“Save it for later,” David said from the living room. He pressed a final key on his laptop and beckoned them over. “We’ve got a result.”  

They crowded in at his side to view the laptop screen, which was full of undulating lines, not shimmering gold like the ones Danny had imagined, but a toxic chartreuse against a black background. Among the lines, spots of the same colour dotted the virtual landscape: dim and bright, large and small and in-between. As they watched, a spot at the lower right corner of the screen flashed twice and then winked out.

“These are the waveform models.” David’s hand moved, indicating the lines. “And here, these are weaknesses, or wormholes if you like. Most of them are only probabilities—that is, places where there’s a high likelihood that a wormhole might form—but a few are actual wormholes that exist, at least for the moment, at various locations.”

“And the one that brought us here?” Jo was leaning toward the screen, her hands braced on the arm of the sofa, her gaze fixed on the shifting shapes.

“Ah,” David said. “Well, the weak spot you came through seems to have healed itself. I did say they do sometimes, if you recall. I can’t find any indication of it; the dark matter readings are residual at best, and it doesn’t appear as a probability, so it’s unlikely to open up again anytime soon. The good news is that you won’t have to worry about being pulled into another timeline unexpectedly.”

“And the bad news?” Jo turned her head to look him in the eye. “I know there is some.”

“The bad news is that you can’t use that wormhole anymore, because it doesn’t exist. You need another one to return to your own timeline.”

“What are the odds of finding one?”

“Unknown. The number of waveforms is nearly infinite. You might get a naturally occurring weakness that leads to that same timeline tomorrow, or not for a million years.” He saw Jo’s horrified face and added, “The other option would be trying to create one artificially. That actually might be better, because you could choose another location to arrive in. You mentioned that people live in this flat in the 1985 timeline, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah,” Danny said. “It was sheer luck they didn’t catch me the first time, and the second time we had to work out a way to be sure they wouldn’t be there. We can’t do that from this end.”

“Hang on, though,” Jo said. “When you say you could choose a location, does that mean any location? Could you create an artificial wormhole and set it so I’d come out in my own bedroom at home?”

“According to all available knowledge, a wormhole in one timeline always leads directly to the same location in other timelines, so to do that we’d have to be able to access your family’s home in this timeline, which could be difficult. But if we could create a wormhole in a public place—a wooded area, for example, or a park—and if we could control for slippage, you might be able to manipulate the time of day as well, so you could come out very early in the morning or late at night, when fewer people are likely to be around.”

Jo looked over at Danny. “Are you thinking…?”

“The park along the road,” Danny said. “We know it exists in the 1985 timeline, and you know the area well enough to get home again with no problem once you’re there. It’s perfect.”

“Not so fast,” David cautioned. “Remember this is all still at the research phase. It’s true what I said to your brother; I haven’t got a time machine, just a way to see the waveforms and probabilities, and manipulate them on a minor scale. I’ve created some small artificial wormholes in the lab, under test conditions, but they’ve only lasted a few seconds at a time and I’ve never put anything through one. It’s going to take some additional thought and trial to make certain it’s safe and relatively accurate.” He gave Jo a small, rueful smile. “You are Annie’s friend, after all. I’ve got to look after you for her sake.”

A flicker of pain crossed Jo's face at the mention of Annie's name, but she smoothed it over quickly. “Of course."  

"Do you think it's possible?" Danny asked. "Creating a wormhole that's safe to use, I mean."

“Also unknown.” David took off his glasses, inspected the lenses for dust, put them back on again and pushed them up in a now-familiar gesture. “But I can set my research students to work on it. Some of them have already been helping with the controlled experiments; they’ll just have to step up the pace, perhaps put some of their other work on the back burner for a bit. Give us a few days to see if it's even possible, and then we can take some decisions.”

David made some additional notes and ran a few test models, which Danny found mesmerising and rather beautiful to watch as the waveforms expanded and contracted on the screen, and then he packed his gear and left, promising to contact them the following day with an update. As soon as he'd gone, Jo announced that she was tired and was going to bed, leaving Danny to wade through the emails he'd missed by leaving the office early, and to begin compiling a list of answers to asbestos-related questions from the other Jo. Deep down, his mind was still turning over the notion that the other Jo he was doing this work for wasn't even really the other Jo he knew—or was she? For that matter, was _he_ even who he thought he was? How many times had his own timeline collapsed and merged him with another version of himself? Which one was the Danny Foster who had nearly drowned in Brancaster Bay eighteen years ago? 

At last he gave up for the evening and went quietly into his darkened bedroom, feeling around on the floor for the old t-shirt and joggers he'd slept in the night before. He was just pulling the shirt down when he heard Jo sit up in bed.

“Danny, is that you?”

“Oh shit, sorry, I didn't mean to wake you." 

"It's all right, I wasn't sleeping very well anyway." 

"What's the matter?" 

"What _isn't_ the matter?" 

Danny rolled his discarded clothes into a ball and tossed them in the general direction of the basket in the corner. "Okay, it sounds as if we need to talk. Budge up, I'm getting in." 

Jo moved over and turned back one side of the duvet for him, and he slid underneath and sat propped up against the headboard, leaving some space between them. 

“I know how you must have felt, now," she said. "When we were in my timeline, I knew you wanted to go home, and I understood that, but I didn’t _really_ understand what it meant for you to be there. I didn’t know how out of place it would feel to be in the wrong time. It’s as if I’ve gone to a party I wasn’t invited to, and no one’s noticed yet that I don’t belong here, but any second now they will.”

“They won’t, though,” Danny said. “A few people gave me strange looks in 1985, but most of them didn’t pay any attention to me at all, and no one ever accused me of being a time traveller. You’re perfectly safe.”

“I don’t feel safe,” Jo said. Her voice had the watery sound of barely suppressed tears. “And that's not the worst of it." 

Danny suspected he knew the answer, but he asked the question anyway. "What's the worst?" 

“It's Annie,” Jo said, and now she was really crying, harder than he’d ever heard any version of her in any timeline cry, with choked, painful sobs that threatened to split his heart in two. "Annie's _dead_." 

“She won’t have been the version of herself you know, Jo. Remember how the timelines diverge after they separate? Your Annie may live to see her great-grandchildren.”

“Yes, but—"

“I know." He reached out in the dark and patted her shoulder awkwardly, trying to comfort her. "It’s the same with my dad. He’s dead in my timeline and this one, but he’s alive in yours. It’s hard to think about.”

“My dad’s dead in this timeline as well. I looked for him and my mum when I was searching for David, and finding that out was bad enough, but I never thought to look for Annie because she’s not—she wasn't—she wouldn't have been old.” Jo drew a trembling breath, sniffed, and turned her face against her pillow as if to dry it. “I read a bit about my other self, too. She’s got a little boy. And a complete tosser of a husband.”

“Not anymore,” Danny said. “They’re divorced, and good riddance.”

“That's another problem, isn't it? I don’t want to be married to him, but if I’m not, then my son’s never born—God, that feels strange to say—so what do I do? I assume the other me must have loved him at some point, but I’ll never be able to, knowing what’s going to happen. Do I marry him anyway and spend years of my life pretending? Would it be worth it? I've got no idea.”

“Neither have I,” Danny said. “But I think you were right not to want to know too much about the future, when we were still in your timeline. What's changed your mind?”

Jo sighed. “In my own timeline you were the only one who could have told me, and I knew you wouldn’t once I'd said not to, so it was all hypothetical. But in this timeline, it’s real, and now, and all that information is just _there_ , waiting to be found. I suppose I got curious, like Bluebeard’s wife.”

“Well, Iain Porter hasn’t got a secret room full of murdered brides, he’s just a selfish prick who fucked the nanny, if that’s any consolation,” Danny said, and was gratified when she laughed, albeit a bit shakily. “Anyway, I don’t think you ought to worry about it too much until you get there. With the divergence, anything might happen. You might never meet him, or he might already be married to someone else when you do, or he might decide to chuck it all and move to Argentina to be a cattle rancher.”

“I’m not going to Argentina.”

“All the more reason not to worry.”

There was a moment of quiet, and then Jo said, “Will you sleep here tonight? With me, I mean, not on the floor or in another room. Scott's not here to say anything about it, and I'd rather not be on my own." 

“Course I will, if you want me to. I'm done caring what Scott has to say, anyway. He’s my brother and I love him, even when he's being like this, but he doesn’t get this time-travelling stuff and what it does to your head.”

"No one does," Jo said, and then paused as if struck by a thought. "Or do they? Suppose we're not the only ones ever to have had an experience like this? How do you find other time travellers, with an advert in the newspaper?" 

"Probably in a chat room these days," Danny said, "if you can find one that's not full of nutters. It's a good question, though. David didn't say how common wormholes are, or weak spots, or whatever you'd like to call them, but there were lots of them in his models, so it only makes sense that someone else could have been caught up in one at some point. We can ask tomorrow, after we both get some sleep."  

"I can't go back to sleep yet," Jo said fretfully. "I've never been less sleepy in my life." 

“I’ve got an idea. Stay right there.” Danny got up and padded into the deserted living room, where he switched on a single lamp and crouched in front of the DVD shelf. His own collection was mostly documentaries and dramas, but he thought Scott might have what he was looking for, and he was right. With the plastic case in hand and his laptop under one arm, he returned to his room and climbed back into bed.

“What are you doing?”

“Giving you a sneak preview of a classic.” He slotted the DVD into the drive, balanced the computer on his duvet-covered lap, and adjusted the sound as the Universal Pictures logo filled the screen, making them both blink against the sudden brightness. “You’ll finally understand all those references to Doc Brown and Marty McFly. Just don’t tell anyone you’ve already seen it when you go home.”

“What’s it about? Apart from time travel, that is. I've already guessed that much.”

“You’ll see. Sshhh.”

“Don’t sshhh me,” Jo said, with a touch of her usual spirit, but she rearranged her pillow behind her back and settled down to watch. “Oh, a room full of ticking clocks. That’s subtle— _agh_! All right, stop kicking me. I'll be quiet."  

"That's better." He saw the long, wet trail of a tear she'd missed still shining on her cheek, and reached over to wipe it away with his thumb. 

"What?" 

"Nothing. Watch the film.”


	17. Chapter 17

Danny woke up in the morning to stillness and silence. Jo was still asleep next to him, her hair all mussed and one arm flung up over her head in total surrender to unconsciousness. He switched off his alarm, got out of bed quietly, so as not to disturb her, and went into the kitchen to discover that Scott had finished both the milk and the butter the previous day. Typical. If he ate the last of any shared food, he’d be reminded to replace it almost before the empty container hit the bottom of the bin, but Scott apparently had no qualms about buggering off to see his girlfriend for the night and leaving his brother to eat dry toast.

He found a jar with a few spoonfuls of strawberry jam that still looked all right, slapped that on instead, and sat down to go through all the emails the other Jo had sent him in the middle of the night. She’d struggled with insomnia ever since she started living on her own, but usually got a day or two of relief after a visit to the chiropractor; the asbestos controversy must be weighing heavily on her mind. Maybe he’d ask for four shots of espresso in her latte instead of three, he thought, crunching at a toast crust, although grown-up Jo with too much caffeine on board was a bit like unstable dynamite.

On his way to the shower, he nearly collided with the young version of Jo, who had just emerged from his room looking groggy and dazed, much like her counterpart probably was at the moment.

“Sorry, do you need to get in?” He nodded toward the bathroom door.

“No, I’m all right.” Jo rested her head against the wall behind her and rubbed both hands over her eyes, trying to clear away the last remnants of sleep. “I wanted to speak to you before you left, though. Are you going to tell the other Jo about everything today?" 

“If I have the chance,” Danny said. “I’d rather do it over our dinner tomorrow night, to be honest. She’ll be more relaxed, and she won’t be able to make a scene because we’ll be in public.”

“What sort of scene do you think she’s going to make?”

“The not believing me sort,” Danny said. “Remember when I told you? You were ready to storm out of that café on me.”

Jo bit her lip. “I suppose I was. It feels like that happened a hundred years ago."

"Not a hundred," Danny said, "just twenty-three." 

"Ha, very funny. Only this time’s different, isn’t it? You’ve got me as evidence. You said if you showed me to her, she’d have to believe it. You _did_ , Danny.”

“I know, but I still want to ease her into it if I can. She’s under a lot of stress at the moment. And she’s going to be under even more stress if I’m late in to the office, so if you’re sure you don’t need the bathroom for anything…” He indicated the towel draped over his shoulder, and Jo sighed and pushed herself away from the wall.

“I’m sure. I’m going back to bed. Good luck at work.” She wrinkled up her nose as if disgusted at herself. “I sound like my mother. I’ll see you.”

She disappeared into his room again and closed the door, and Danny, wishing he could just go back to bed as well, dutifully went through the rest of his morning routine and left only a few minutes behind schedule. On the way into the building, juggling the other Jo’s coffee order with his security badge, he heard the overlapping tones of both an incoming SMS and a voice message from the phone in his coat pocket, and made his way over to a place in the bustling foyer where he could set down the cup and check.       

 

 

> **_New Message_ ** _  
> _From: Scott__
> 
> _dont forget we're having that talk later. be there when i get in. i mean it danny_
> 
> _Thurs, 17 April, 09:17:03_

Danny rolled his eyes, thumbed the Delete key, and switched over to the voicemail instead. 

_"Hello Daniel, it's David Keating here. I've had a chat with two of my research students, and we'd like to see you and Joanne in the lab this evening to take some additional readings and ask a few more questions. Can you come at seven? Thanks very much."_

_Additional readings_? he wondered. It sounded forbidding, and gave him visions of being loaded feet-first into some sort of alien-looking scanner like a human torpedo and bombarded with gamma rays. Knowing that young Jo was sure to have the same question, he turned his back on the stream of people heading in to work, all smart clothes and clicking heels and briefcases, pressed Call Back and waited. The phone at the other end rang once, and then grown-up Jo's voice said "Danny!" right next to his free ear and gave him a horrible shock. He fumbled the mobile, almost had it, and then it slipped through his desperately grasping fingers and fell to the marble floor, where it landed face-up and shot away like a slippery carp on the back of its rounded case.

"Shit!" He dived for it, but Jo was faster, taking two quick steps before putting out a foot and stopping it neatly with the side of her shoe. She bent and scooped it up, causing Danny a moment of sheer panic that she might somehow end up speaking to David if he'd answered already.

"It's not broken." She gave the screen a cursory glance and then handed the device back to him. "I think you've lost your connection, though. Sorry about that. I hope it wasn't an important call." 

"That's all right, I can try again later. Jesus, Jo, you scared the life out of me." He snapped the mobile closed, dropped it into his pocket, and went back to collect her coffee from the ledge where he'd set it. "Did you sleep at all last night?"  

"Eventually," Jo said, taking the cup from him. Her hair was pulled back this morning, and in the bright early light he saw every detail of her sharp and clear, as if he were about to paint her: the soft wisps escaping at the nape of her neck, the fine lines and delicate purplish shadows under her eyes, the tiny pierced holes in her earlobes. "You must have slept like the dead, though. I can't remember the last time I emailed you before midnight and didn't get an answer." 

"Yeah, I was in bed by then," Danny said. The amount of context missing from that statement made him wince inwardly, but this didn't seem the time to go into it. "But I worked on your project before I turned in. I've got some statistics I think you'll be interested in."

"Good, let's go up and look at them."

She piled her handbag, laptop case and coat into his waiting arms, had a long gulp of her coffee, and turned to go, forcing him to hurry and catch her up the way he'd done with young Jo outside the gates of St Margaret's. All she needed was the uniform kilt and blazer to complete the picture, he thought, following her into the lift and up to their suite. 

They went over his statistics, which pleased her enormously, and then she turfed him out of her office and shut the door to start yet another morning of phone calls. He'd found it lonely in the outer office ever since Kirsty had gone, but today he was glad to be on his own and have a chance to think, as well as to Google a few of the terms David had casually tossed about the night before. He tried  _artificial wormholes_  and  _temporal probabilities_  and  _waveforms,_  and then stumbled onto the Wikipedia entry for the Large Hadron Collider, which was terrifying and, he hoped, not representative of whatever equipment David might have in his lab. The material was more user-friendly than some of the thorny treatises he'd tried reading during his last few days in the 1985 timeline, but the conclusion he reached was the same: unless you were Einstein (or perhaps David Keating), there was simply no way to develop even a passing understanding of quantum physics in a morning.

He turned his attention back to his actual work, and just before noon, Jo opened her door and leaned out to ask if he'd pop over to another building and collect a reference book she'd let someone borrow when he was away. 

"And you may as well go to lunch as long as you're out," she added. "You can bring me a sandwich when you come back. I don't care what kind as long as it's not tuna."  

"Will do," Danny said, thinking that this would be a perfect opportunity to try ringing David back again, which he hadn't dared to do where Jo might overhear him. He tried the number as soon as he was at a safe distance, but only got David's recorded voice, saying that he was teaching or in the laboratory and would return the call at his earliest convenience. 

Danny disconnected without leaving a message and punched in the number for Scott's flat instead—he could at least tell young Jo to be ready for an evening trip to the lab, even if he couldn't give her any more information about it than he already had. He didn't expect her to answer without knowing who it was, but when he'd waited for the tone and said "Jo, you there? It's me," there was still no response. He gave it one more go, imagining his voice echoing around the empty living room, and ended that call as well. She had the spare key; she'd probably gone out for a walk, or to buy more milk, and would be back any moment now. He'd run the other Jo's errand, eat his lunch, and then try again.  

He was expecting that errand to take a few minutes at the most, but when he got there he had to wait to be seen, and then wait again for the book to be located and handed over to him, and it was an hour later when he finally escaped into the early afternoon sun. He sent older Jo a message asking if she needed him or if he could still take time for lunch, but got no more answer from her than he had from her younger self. Surely if she wanted him back straight away she'd say so, he thought, and took the executive decision to go and have lunch anyway. 

With one thing and another, a second hour had passed by the time he was on his way back up, with the book tucked under his arm and Jo's sandwich—ham, not tuna—in a paper bag in his other hand. The outer door was ajar, which was odd, but everything looked quiet and ordinary inside: screen saver swirling gently on his monitor, red message lamp blinking on his desk phone, and the door to Jo's office shut, just the way it had been when he left. He knocked, waited for her to tell him either to come in or go away, and when he heard nothing, pushed the door open. 

"Sorry I was so long," he began, and then broke off as he realised that the young version of Jo was seated in the chair directly opposite the other version of her. On the desk between her and her older self, her gold cross necklace lay spread out with its clasp undone. Two pairs of identical dark eyes rose from it to meet his, one pair full of guilt, the other full of shock.

“Jo,” he breathed, not entirely sure in the moment which of them he was addressing. “What are you doing?”

“I couldn’t wait any longer, Danny.” Young Jo was apologetic, but determined. “I had to see her and talk to her. Don’t be angry.”

“I—”

“I’m sure he understands, don’t you, Danny?” older Jo said, and Danny switched his focus to her, wondering just how much trouble he was in. She looked shaken to the core—pale as milk and more unsettled than he’d ever seen her, even in the midst of the worst personal or political crisis—but she was still herself, and her tone foreclosed the possibility of argument.

He nodded automatically, and young Jo pushed back her chair, stood up and came to him. She had clearly put some thought into preparing for this visit: she was wearing the same combination of short dress and cardigan he’d often seen on Kirsty, her hair was twisted up and pinned at the back in a more formal style than usual, and the pink lipstick was in full force. She easily could have passed for an intern, which he supposed was how she'd been able to walk the halls unquestioned. 

"Don't just agree because you've been told to," she said. "Say it to me if you really mean it."

"I understand," he said. "Really."

"Do you promise?"

"I swear." He could feel older Jo watching them and chose his words as carefully as he could. "How much of it have you told her?" 

"Everything up until I came here with you," young Jo said. "I had to do the convincing bit first, and that took some time."  

"Oh," Danny said. He was still struggling to process the sight of the two of them in the same room together; it was like the doubling sensation he'd had several times before, only on steroids. "How did you...?"

“She showed me this,” older Jo said. She lifted the necklace from the desk and held it up; the crucifix trembled delicately at the end of the chain, and he realised her hand was shaking. “It was a confirmation present from my parents. I haven’t worn it in twenty years, but I still have it. I saw it this morning when I was looking for a missing earring.”

“That’s all it took?”

“Not quite,” young Jo said. “I also reminded her of a few things no one else knows, the way you did with me and the Olympics, only I had lots more material to draw from.” She glanced over at her older self. “I haven’t told him any of that, by the way. Private things are private.”

“Good to know," older Jo said. "Speaking of privacy, would you mind stepping outside for just a moment? I'd like to have a word with Danny alone." 

Young Jo's gaze flicked from her to Danny and back again, and he saw the wheels turning as she tried to gauge what was going on between them. She'd been confident in her ability to know what the other Jo was thinking, but he suspected that now they were actually face to face, she was finding her older self more inscrutable than she'd thought. 

“Yes, of course," she said at last. "I'll sit at Danny's desk, shall I?" 

"If you like; just lock the door to the corridor first," older Jo said. "Have a Jaffa Cake. He keeps them in his drawer, top right. We won't be long." 

Young Jo left, and older Jo got up to close the door behind her. As soon as it clicked shut, she whirled on Danny like a war goddess whose temple had just been defiled by a blundering idiot, and he tried to brace himself for what was coming.

“Did you not think I might need to know about this?”

“I was going to tell you,” he said helplessly. 

“When? When were you going to tell me, Danny? You do understand that this is a lot bigger than you disappearing for a few weeks, don’t you? Even bigger than you turning up again with a duplicate of me, which is—I haven't got the words for what that is.” She advanced on him, crowding him backward against her desk, and jabbed him in the chest with a stiff forefinger. “This is actual  _time travel_ , for Christ’s sake. I can't believe I'm even saying it. It sounds insane." 

“Well, it’s not exactly time travel in the way people usually think of it,” Danny said.

“So I’ve heard,” Jo said. “But it’s not exactly a coach tour to Cardiff either, is it?

“No,” Danny said, thinking that a coach tour to Cardiff sounded rather relaxing at the moment.

“And have you considered what would happen if people found out that it’s possible to travel in time?”

“Of course I have." 

“No, you haven't actually, because if you had, you'd be a lot more frightened than you are." Jo left off poking him—he was fairly certain he'd have a bruise there later—and sat down on the edge of her desk, leaving him to sit in the chair her other self had recently vacated. "Let me just lay it out for you, Danny. The first thing that would happen is that everyone who knows about this, including you and Scott and both versions of me, would be in danger of kidnapping or worse, first and foremost by the very government we work for. You’ve actually been through one of these portals—"

"Wormholes." 

"Whatever. So you’d have the extra-special privilege of being shut up in some sort of research facility while they sequenced your DNA and took biopsies of all your major organs, like a lab rat in a hospital gown. Maybe they’d get you a treadmill to run on instead of a great big wheel.”

“Jo—”

“I haven’t finished. They’d try to keep it secret, but it’d get out in the end, because these things always do. And when it did, every country on the planet would start looking for some military application for it. Mineral companies would try to work out how to set up strip-mining operations in alternate timelines to plunder their natural resources. And then there’d be generally dodgy people wanting to hop from timeline to timeline to rob banks or sell drugs or steal the crown jewels, or who knows what else. It’d be chaos.” She put a hand to her forehead for a moment, eyes closed, as if the idea had given her a headache. "By all rights, I ought to report this to someone above me immediately." 

"Are you going to?"

"Not yet." She opened her eyes again and looked down at him. "First I want to hear the rest of what you've learnt so far. She—I don't even know what to call her—"

"Call her Jo," Danny said. "She's Joanne Rourke, just like you are—were—but she's also not you anymore, quite. Did she tell you about the motorways?" 

"A bit," Jo said. 

"It helps to think of it that way. She _was_ the same person you used to be, twenty-odd years ago, but now she's starting to become someone else, because she's had experiences you haven't had. A different version of you, with her own thoughts and feelings. I know it's hard to get your head around at first." He considered mentioning what David had said about the infinite number of timelines, but thought the existence of one additional self was probably all this Jo was up to handling at the moment. 

"Yes, well," Jo said. "She hadn't finished telling me everything there was to tell when you barged in. I need to know it all before I can decide what to do next, so let's bring her back in and you can help her tell it." 

"I told her I was going to tell you tomorrow night, over dinner, and then introduce the two of you," Danny said. He knew he sounded sullen, but he couldn't help it. "If she'd just waited..."  

“This isn’t her fault, Danny, it’s yours. You’re the older, wiser one here, or at least you’re meant to be. Don’t blame her for telling me something you know you ought to have told me already.” Jo turned the handle and opened the door. "Now go out there and fetch her." 

 

 


	18. Chapter 18

Danny went into the outer office, pulling the door closed behind him, and found young Jo seated at his desk, nervously shredding a yellow sticky note into bits. A small heap of matching confetti on his blotter indicated that she’d already been through six or seven of them. Better that than her fingers, he supposed.

“I know,” she said, before he could get a word out. “I said I was sorry, didn’t I?”

“How did you even know where to find me?”

“You’re not the only one who can do research,” Jo said. “I didn’t mean to go behind your back, though, not really, just to sort of…move things along. I thought if I came, we could talk to her together, but you weren’t here, and when I saw her I was so shocked that she knew something was the matter, and then it was too late and I had to go ahead with it.” She swept the bits of sticky note up and dropped them into the bin under the desk, brushing a few clinging stragglers from her hands. “It’s one thing seeing photos, but actually meeting another version of yourself in person—I can’t explain it. She’s been quite nice to me though. Nicer than I expected.”

“I did tell you she wasn’t a monster,” Danny said. “She’s upset, but she’s not angry at you, she’s angry at me. And she’s scared, and that makes it worse. She doesn’t take that sort of thing well. As you know.” He jerked a thumb at older Jo’s inner sanctum. “She wants you to come back in and finish telling her about the wormholes.”

“What about you?”

“Both of us,” Danny said. “Come on.”

Jo followed him into the office, and they sat side by side in the two straight-backed guest chairs as if they were there for a joint counselling session. Danny warily scanned older Jo’s face to see how the portents for his immediate future were shaping up, but she seemed to have spent the few minutes of his absence pulling herself together, and he couldn’t read her expression at all. It made him uneasy.  

Older Jo leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and steepled her hands under her chin, considering both of her troublesome charges before fastening on Danny.

“So, Daniel,” she said, “now that I’m au courant on the events of the last month—which I’m still not happy you tried to keep from me, by the way—what do you think we should do about this situation?”

“Er, we’re already doing something about it, actually,” Danny said. “We’ve been to see David Keating in this timeline. He's a professor of quantum physics here, instead of a postgraduate student the way 1985 David Keating was.”

Older Jo cast a swift, worried glance at her younger self. “Did he tell you about—?”

Young Jo nodded, sorrowful but dry-eyed. “He told me.”

“All right. What else did he say?”

“He’s been doing research into time travel for years and years, I think since around the point when we spoke to him about it in the other timeline,” Danny said.

“How’s that possible?” older Jo asked. “I’m told the timelines had already split by then. The David you spoke to isn’t the one who lives here.”

“No, but that David was already interested in it, so his other self would have been as well,” Danny said. “The David here started publishing papers on the topic sometime in the late Eighties, after he’d finished his Ph.D. It was only theoretical for a while, and then a few years ago he developed some sort of computer modelling software—most of the explanation went over our heads, but long story short, it can find places where time travel is possible and predict where you’d end up if you used them.”

“Wormholes,” older Jo said, and both of them nodded. “And how many of these wormholes are there? Why aren’t we hearing reports every day about people stumbling through them?”

“Millions of them, I think, but they’re not fixed,” Danny said. “They change size all the time and they can come and go—the one in Scott’s flat isn’t there anymore—so actually being in the right place at the right time to encounter one you could use is pretty unlikely. And, people probably do stumble through them, only you don’t know because they don’t come back again to talk about it, and if they do everyone thinks they’re delusional, the way Scott thinks I am.”

The phone on Jo’s desk trilled softly and she glanced down at its screen, then dismissed whoever was calling as unimportant and turned back to them. “Go on. I'm sure there must be more.”

“He also said he’s been working on creating artificial wormholes in his lab,” young Jo said. “He thinks he might be able to open one that’s stable enough and predictable enough to use, so I can go home.”

“He thinks?”

“I wasn’t bowled over by that bit either,” young Jo said, “especially as I’m the one who’d be going through it. But he’s all there is, and he’s a lot cleverer than any of us, you and me not excepted. We think we’ve got to give him a go.”

“ _We_ being you and my intrepid researcher,” older Jo said with a pointed look between them.

“Who else?” Young Jo sat forward in her chair, and Danny had a strong sensation of watching a couple of lionesses sizing each other up, deciding whether to fight to the death or join forces to bring down an antelope. “We’ve been on our own in all this so far, Danny and me. I think we’ve done well enough, considering. Don’t you?”

Older Jo was too shrewd a player not to recognise a challenge when she saw one. She regarded her counterpart coolly for a long moment, and then to Danny’s relief, she smiled, and young Jo relaxed.

“Well, you might have done much worse. There’s no secret manual of standard protocols for dealing with time travel, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some poor civil servant somewhere who’s been tasked with writing one.” Her desk phone went off again; she made a frustrated noise and pressed a couple of buttons, and the phone at Danny’s desk in the outer office began to ring faintly instead. “So, you're telling me that there’s a theoretical solution to at least part of this problem. How does the theoretical become actual, or have you not got that far yet?”

“David wants to see us in his lab at seven tonight, to take some sort of readings. I tried to phone you about it earlier,” Danny said to young Jo, who looked embarrassed. “Scott’s going to be pissed off. He’s planning some sort of intervention because I’ve lost my mind, going on about time travel, and now I’m not going to be there when he gets in.”

“Tell him I’ve kept you late to deal with something urgent,” older Jo said. “If he wants to argue about it, he can argue with me.” She woke up her computer, clicked something on the screen and grimaced. “I’ve got an appointment just before then. Find a different time for it, Danny, would you? Say I’ve had a family emergency or something.”

“Yeah, of course, but what for?”

“She wants to come with us, obviously,” young Jo said. “To hear what David has to say for herself. I think she should. It’s too hard explaining it all over again later.”

“Yes,” older Jo said, “and if I’ve got to explain it to other people later myself, I’d rather do it from first-hand information.” She drummed her fingers on the surface of her desk with a distracted look on her face. “It’s times like these when I wish I hadn’t had to stop drinking. Getting utterly pissed sounds like a fine option at the moment.”

“Why did you have to stop drinking?” young Jo asked.

“Because I've got a drink problem,” older Jo said flatly. To Danny’s shocked expression, she said, “She’s got a right to know, Danny. It affects her as well, or it could, one day. Oh, don’t look that way, you’re the one who kept trying to get me to admit it, before.”

“Yes, but  _now_?”

“Well, you’re not wrong that we’ve got other things to think about,” older Jo said, and checked her watch. “It’s nearly four. Why don’t you take her back to yours for a bit—”

“I don’t need to be taken back,” young Jo said, in an offended voice. “I can go on my own, the same way I got here.”

“Let Danny go with you,” older Jo said. “Think of it as a favour to me. Only before you go, please can you write down the address to this laboratory you’re meant to be meeting at?” She rummaged around on her desk, found a scrap of paper and a pencil, and pushed them over to Danny, who scribbled down the information for her. “Good boy. I’ll see you both there at seven. Go on now.”

Dismissed, they both got up and filed into the outer office, where Danny rescheduled older Jo's meeting, shut down his computer, and collected his coat and bag before turning to young Jo.

“We don’t have to go home if you don’t want to. We can get a coffee or go for a walk or something. You choose.”

“Home’s fine,” Jo said. She inclined her head toward the closed door of her other self’s office. “You don’t think she wants to get rid of us so she can drink, do you?”

Danny shook his head. “She’s all right. Things were difficult last year, when her marriage was breaking down, but she's had it under control for a while now. I did mean to tell you about it, sooner or later, I just couldn’t think how to bring it up.”

“That’s a bit of an ongoing issue for you, isn’t it,” Jo said tartly. 

“Don’t start.”

He unlocked the door that led from the outer office to the corridor and pulled it open for her, then set the lock again and closed the door behind them. Neither of them said a word on the way down in the lift, or in the foyer, until they finally passed through the exit and into an afternoon that had turned unexpectedly wet and grey. Jo shivered, and he silently untangled his scarf from his coat collar and wrapped it round her neck instead, tucking the ends into the half-zipped front of her jacket.

“Thanks.” She looked up at him, suddenly vulnerable, and he saw a telltale shine in her eyes. “I really am sorry about before, Danny. Are you sure you meant it when you said you weren’t angry?”

“I still wish you’d waited for me, but yeah, I do understand why you felt as if you had to do it.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and nudged her shoulder gently with his, in lieu of a hug. “We’re good, you and me.”

“That’s a relief,” Jo said, and gave him a nudge back. “I don't want any bad feelings between us."

“Neither do I," Danny said. "And I won’t keep anything from you anymore—either of you. It’s brutal honesty from here on out, even if it gets me in trouble. If I survived telling the other Jo she was drinking too much, I can survive anything.”

“I don’t suppose she liked hearing it."

“You could say that,” Danny said. “I’ll tell you the whole story if you like. It'll help kill time." 

"Time's always our problem," Jo said, as they started walking. "We've got too much of it, or not enough, or one of us is in the wrong one. The most I'd ever considered it before was wondering how many more minutes until the end of a lesson, and now it's been practically the only thing on my mind for weeks."

"Well, when you're back in your own timeline, you won't have to worry about it anymore." Danny sidestepped a woman rolling a baby and toddler along in a bright blue double pushchair, on a collision course with him. "You can be an ordinary person again. Go to uni. Live your life." 

"Can I, though?" Jo dodged the pushchair woman as well and caught him up with a hurried step. "Can you? Because I don't think either of us is ever going to be quite the same after this, Danny. I don't think this is the sort of experience you can just forget about. You can't un-know what you know. I'd thought of that even before we came here—it's what kept me awake that last night before we broke into the Millers' flat—but now I'm more certain of it than ever. And you'll have the other me to talk to about it, and David, and even Scott if we can make him believe somehow, but I'll be there alone in 1985 with no one who understands."

"Maybe not," Danny said. "Remember what you said last night? There could be other time travellers out there, in your timeline as well as this one. We don't know what's going to happen yet, so just try not to think about it until then.” He put out a hand, and she took it as they walked on. “Everything'll be all right somehow, Jo. You'll see." 


	19. Chapter 19

Danny was expecting David’s laboratory to be near his fourth-floor office, but when he and Jo arrived for their meeting a few hours later, they took multiple wrong turnings before finally finding it on a windowless subterranean level, accessible only via a musty-smelling stairwell tucked behind a door marked WAY OUT. They emerged in a dead-end corridor that was doing double duty as a storage cupboard, stacked with cardboard boxes and odd bits of equipment painted in bright primary colours, and discovered older Jo there already, pacing outside the lab entrance and having a phone conversation in a low, intense voice.  
  
“Of course not. Why would I—” She glanced up and spotted Danny and her younger self. “I’ve got to go. Yes, right now. We’ll discuss this later.”

“Iain?” Danny asked as she ended the call and switched off the screen. Probably on Scott's recommendation, she'd replaced her old mobile with one of the new iPhones during his time as a missing person, and it was odd seeing her with such a shiny bit of technology. She’d never been one to queue up for the latest gadget the moment it was released, which was why he hadn't been surprised at the lack of a computer in her 1985 bedroom. 

“Who else?” Jo said. “He and Ljubica want to take Clem to visit her family this summer, slap-bang in the middle of my longest stretch of time with him, and if he thinks I’m going to—” She looked at young Jo and seemed to realise that this was an upsetting topic. “You know, never mind Iain. Fuck Iain, in fact.”

“I’d rather not,” young Jo said.  
  
“Probably a wise decision," older Jo said, dropping the phone into her bag. "Anyway, we've got more pressing matters to attend to. Are you ready to go in?”  
  
Young Jo sighed. "Not really, but we’ve got to, so let’s get on with it. Do we knock or…?”  
  
Older Jo nodded at a square box with a button and a speaker grille, mounted on the wall just to the right of the door. A peeling label underneath read PRESS TO CALL in white embossed letters on black tape. Young Jo leaned past Danny and pressed the button without hesitation, and after a brief pause, a female voice said “Yes?”  
  
“It’s Joanne Porter, Joanne Rourke and Daniel Foster here to see Dr Keating,” older Jo said briskly, although Danny noticed she hesitated just a little over her own birth name. “We’ve got an appointment.”  
  
“Hang on a moment,” the voice said. There was another pause, and then they heard the click of the door automatically unlatching, and a plump, dark-haired woman in jeans and a flannel check shirt pushed it open, wedging one trainer-clad foot against the base to keep it that way.  
  
“Sorry about that,” she said. “We try not to let people in on their own, at least not until they’ve had the safety lecture. Speaking of which, you’ll need to tie your hair back.” She felt in her pocket, pulled out an elastic band, and handed it to older Jo. “I see everyone's wearing closed-toed shoes. Has anyone got a pacemaker?" They all shook their heads no. "Good. Don’t touch any surfaces unless you’re certain they’re not hot; if you see broken glass, tell someone straight away; and if you catch on fire, stand under one of the emergency showers and turn it on.”  
  
“Was that the safety lecture?” young Jo asked.  
  
“The short version,” the woman said. “The long version comes with a handout and slides if you’d like to have that one instead.”  
  
“I’m all right,” young Jo said, and the woman grinned.  
  
“That’s what I thought. My name’s Mel Cheng, and I work under Dr Keating. He’s just finishing something, but I know he’s expecting you. Come in, and I’ll find badges for you while you’re waiting.”  
  
Thanks to his morning of Googling, Danny had at least some idea of what to expect inside, but both versions of Jo looked surprised and rather awed by the scene spread out below them. They’d come out on a catwalk running round three sides of a massive, open room, with a sunken pit that held a bewildering array of machinery and spaghetti-like cabling, all arranged in a ring formation with identical wedge-shaped metal boxes spaced around it at regular intervals. A set of steps with yellow-painted handrails ran down into the pit, where David was talking to a fair-haired, burly young man and another woman. He looked up and caught Danny’s eye, gave a few final instructions to his colleagues, and then bounded up the steps to meet his visitors.  
  
“Hello again, you two. Good of you to come on short notice.” He shook hands with Danny and young Jo, and then turned to older Jo. “And it’s lovely to meet you in person at last, Mrs Porter. I’ve got to admit, I feel as if I already know you—I’ve seen you on the news, of course, but mainly I remember Annie talking about you. Our mum was so pleased about the flowers you sent when—”  
  
“I’d have come in person if I could,” older Jo said, extending her hand for him to shake. “I’d just had a baby at the time and things were a bit—well—complicated.”  
  
“Of course."  
  
Danny did some swift mental calculations, trying to work out when Annie’s accident would have happened. He remembered Jo dragging herself into the office a few days after giving birth to Clem, swollen and exhausted and looking as as if she’d been in the wars, but he couldn’t remember her asking him to arrange flowers for a funeral, either then or at any time shortly after, which meant she must have done it herself. Why hadn’t she told him she’d suffered a loss?  
  
_Because it wasn’t about you, idiot_ , he thought, and forced his attention deliberately back to David, who had let go Jo’s hand and was introducing his postgraduate students.  
  
“That’s Evan Davies down there with Priya Rai-Morgan—” He indicated the man and woman in the pit, then turned to Mel, who had disappeared for a few minutes and was just returning. “And you’ll already have met Melanie. Have you got their dosimetry badges?”  
  
“Right here.” Mel held up the badges, which were white and plastic-coated and imprinted with barcodes, and then gave one out to each of them. “Clip them somewhere on your chest or torso, and they’ll monitor radiation exposure so you can be sure you’re not getting too high a dose. Don’t worry though, it’s really safe as long as you stay in the shielded areas when the particle accelerator is firing.”  
  
“Like the Large Hadron Collider,” Danny said, remembering his reading.  
  
“Yes, but nothing like that powerful,” David said. “The Large Hadron Collider’s actually the endpoint in CERN’s accelerator complex.”  
  
“Translation, please,” older Jo said. She’d attached her badge to the lapel of her jacket and used Mel’s elastic to pull her hair back from her face, and now she was ready for action. “I did my degree in history, and even that was a long time ago.”  
  
“Ah,” David said, and Danny saw his face light up with his other self’s pleasure and enthusiasm for his subject. “Well, let's see. You’re aware of what a particle accelerator does, correct?”  
  
“In general,” older Jo said. She glanced at Danny and young Jo, who both nodded. "I think we all are. Go on."   
  
“Right. So an accelerator complex employs multiple machines to accelerate particles past the speed that one accelerator could achieve on its own. Each machine in the sequence receives the particles from the previous one and boosts them—although some machines, like the Antiproton Decelerator, actually slow them down so they can be studied—before passing them on to the next. The last machine in the chain at CERN’s complex is the Large Hadron Collider, and it can accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light. When they first switched it on, people were worried it might generate a black hole that could tear the planet apart.”  
  
“It can’t though, can it?” young Jo asked.  
  
“No, no,” David assured her. “Well. Not on its own, that is.”  
  
Older Jo seized on that statement like a hawk sighting a field mouse. “What do you mean, not on its own?”   
  
“Well, anything’s theoretically possible with the right inputs, but there’s no point worrying about that, is there?” David said, clearly meaning to be reassuring and having quite the opposite effect. “Anyway, we’d love to have an accelerator complex at our disposal, but there’s not enough physical space; the Large Hadron Collider is housed in a tunnel 27 km long, and even the Diamond Light Source at Harwell, which is the national synchrotron, is half a kilometer around. That said, Priya’s come up with some modifications for the equipment we _have_ got, and we can accomplish quite a lot.”  
  
Danny stole a sidelong glance first at young Jo, then at older Jo, and found them wearing nearly identical perturbed expressions; the only difference was that the vertical crease between older Jo’s brows had grown more pronounced with time. They both turned away from him to look down into the pit as David called to Priya and Evan.  
  
“Are you ready for Daniel and Joanne?”  
  
“Half a minute,” Evan called back. There was a computer workstation in the centre of the ring, all bare black metal framework with a monitor and keyboard wired into it; he and Priya consulted something on the screen, and then came up together to join the group and go through another round of handshaking and pleasantries. Up close, Evan reminded Danny more than a bit of the two Norsemen who'd spent so many raucous nights across the way from him at the hostel in the 1985 timeline, with a matching grip that left Danny's fingers feeling as if they'd been cranked slowly through a mangle. Not wanting to let on, he hid his hand in his coat pocket, where he could discreetly flex it until it stopped aching. 

"You mentioned something about readings in your message," he said to David. 

"That'll be Priya's department." David gestured to her to take over the conversation.

"Yes," Priya said. “As you’ve been through a stable wormhole, there may be signatures left in your body that we can match to the waveform patterns in Dr Keating’s software, to improve our targeting when we begin trying to open wormholes on our own. Small changes to organs, to DNA—”

At that, older Jo shot Danny a look that said _What did I tell you_? _Here's where the lab-rat experiments begin._ He scowled at her and turned back to Priya, who had a Welsh accent that made everything she said sound soothing, but also made it difficult to focus on the actual words she was using instead of their cadence. He wondered if she found it very easy to talk her way out of speeding penalties and return things in shops without a receipt. 

“Or even to bones," Priya went on, "especially in you, Miss Rourke, but perhaps in you as well, Mr Foster. You’ll both have finished growing in height some time ago, but the epiphyseal plates at the ends of bones don't ossify fully until as late as thirty years of age in some people, so we might find markers in the cells there.”

"Never thought I'd be so glad to be fully ossified," older Jo said, half under her breath.  
  
“Er,” Danny said. “How are you going to look for these markers, exactly? We’re not talking about some sort of invasive procedure, are we?”  
  
“Not at all,” Priya said, smiling. “It’s just a few scans, very simple. You won’t even need to take off your shoes. Who'd like to go first?"

"I will," young Jo said. 

"Are you sure?" Danny touched her arm. "I'll do it if you'd rather." 

Young Jo shook her head, mouth set in a grim line. "If I have time to sit and think about it, I'll be nervous. I'd rather have it over and done with. Show me to your scanner," she said to Priya and Evan, who led her not down into the pit, but along the catwalk to an unmarked door, with David and Melanie following. 

"She'll be fine," older Jo said irritably, watching him as they went. "And she won't like you hovering over her like a nursemaid, any more than I do when you do it to me, so stop it." She gave him a light warning smack on the shoulder, and he made a show of rubbing the spot. 

"Not you too. I've already had my hand crushed by Evan the Destroyer. I don't need any more injuries." He looked down at her, deceptively small and slender in her smart work attire, and felt another one of those waves of unreality, wondering which of her he was really talking to, and whether he was even the one doing the talking. "You seem to have taken to the idea of having another self pretty easily, if you don't mind me saying so. When I left you in the office earlier, you looked as if you thought you were losing your mind." 

" _Easily_ isn't the word I would have chosen," Jo said. She reached into a side pocket of her bag and came out with something clutched in a closed fist. "Hold out your hand." 

Danny obediently put it out, and she opened her own hand and let young Jo's necklace slither into his palm—no, not one necklace, but two identical ones. With finger and thumb, she delicately arranged the pendants to lie side by side, and for the first time he noticed a tiny, stylised dove figure at the crossbar of each one, golden wings spread. 

"I sat in my office and stared at hers for ages," Jo said, "and finally I took it home to compare to mine. I was hoping I'd made a mistake and they weren't really the same, but they are. It can't just be that she bought one in a shop, either, because mine was made specially for me, years and years ago. Some of the gold in it is from my grandmother's wedding ring. If Priya and Evan put them both through their scanner, I'm sure they'd be the same, all the way down to the atomic level. And if there can be two of them, then I've got to accept that there can be two of us as well." 

"She'll be glad to hear that's all you were doing," Danny said. "After that bomb you dropped about your drinking, she was frightened you'd sent us away so you could get plastered in private." 

"I'm sure she was," Jo regarded him, eyebrows lifted. "And what about you, Daniel? Did you think I'd crack under the pressure and fall headlong into a bottle of whisky?"  

"No." 

"Really?" 

"Really," he said firmly, as the door along the catwalk opened. "Look, they've finished already."

"So they have," Jo said. "Go on and have your turn, but if anything happens that makes you uncomfortable—I mean anything—I want you to tell me." 

"I thought it was our government you didn't trust." 

"I don't trust it, and I don't trust this lot yet either, not completely. They're a bit too relaxed about the forces they're dealing with." She took the twin necklaces away from him and curled them into her hand. "The only person I really trust apart from myself is you, Danny. Now go have your scan and come straight back. I'll look after things here." 


	20. Chapter 20

The young version of Jo had come out of the scanning room alone, and Danny clattered down the metal grille of the catwalk to meet her, catching her halfway along the gentle incline.

“You okay?”

“Fine. It’s no worse than X-rays at the dentist's.” Her hand rose to her neck, feeling for something that wasn’t there. “Only they asked me to take off my jewellery first, and I realised I must have left my necklace at your office. We went in such a hurry, I didn’t think.”

“It’s fine, the other Jo’s got it.” Danny turned to look at the top of the catwalk, where older Jo appeared at first glance to be leaning against the yellow safety railing, scrolling through her new iPhone. Then she adjusted her position and he saw she’d just taken a photo of the lab, with a focus on the pit full of machinery and cabling below. She caught him watching her and shook her head, almost imperceptibly, and he made himself turn away again.  

“Go on up and I’m sure she’ll give it back,” he said. “And stay close to her, will you?”

Young Jo looked unimpressed at this request. “You’re not going to do that overprotective brother thing again, are you? If you could trust me to help you in my timeline, I think you can trust me to look after myself in this one.”

“Yeah, I’ve already had a lecture about not hovering, so you can thank the other Jo for that when you speak to her,” Danny said. “But I can tell she’s worried about this whole situation, and it’s making me nervous. Some of the stuff she’s said sounds a bit paranoid, but she’s right about things more often than not, so just for the moment I’d feel better if you were together.”

“All right, if you like.” Jo picked restlessly at one of the plasters on her fingers, now worn and frayed at the edges; Danny felt in his coat pocket and handed her a piece of gum, and she took it and unwrapped it as she climbed past him. He watched just long enough to see her reach the other Jo, who put the iPhone away and said something that he couldn’t hear, but which made both of them grin. Hoping it was some sort of private joke that only alternate selves could understand, and not a laugh at his expense, he made his way along to the scanning room, where Mel met him at the door with a rectangular plastic tub thrust out.

“Everything metal in here—jewellery, keys, pocket knife if you’ve got one—and your mobile phone.”

He dropped in keys and phone, undid his watch and surrendered that as well, and checked for anything else he might have missed.

“That’s all.”

“In you go, then.”

Mel stood aside and let him into the room, where he found a darkened area facing a wide window with complicated equipment on both sides. Priya and Evan were both seated, talking to each other in incomprehensible terms and fiddling with touch screens, but David, who was leaning against the wall nearest the door, turned to greet him with a smile.

“There you are, Daniel. This really will take only a moment, I promise.”

“I know,” Danny said. “Jo was in and out like a shot.” He paused, thinking about Jo in her own timeline, sucking down Marlboro Lights as if it were her job. Of course she hadn’t been at it long enough to have done herself any real harm, but-- “Her scans were all right, weren’t they?”

“Just fine,” David said. “It’ll take some time to do the full analysis for the markers we’re hoping to find, but at a glance everything points to her being a perfectly healthy young woman, just as she should be. She hasn’t been exposed to any significant amount of radiation, either, which we were all a bit concerned about.”

“You were?” Up until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to Danny that their travels might have had any worse effect than temporary motion sickness, but the word _radiation_ made images of bald, burnt people covered in weeping ulcers and peeling skin spring unbidden into his mind. Surely that would have happened already if it were going to, wouldn’t it?

“Well, yes.” Even in the dim light, David looked embarrassed. “No one really knew how much radiation a wormhole would generate, you see, but luckily it seems to be very little, certainly not enough to cause the sort of tissue damage that leads to problems later in life. Good news for you in particular, as you’ve been through twice.”

“Very good,” Danny said weakly. He wasn’t certain where to go from there, but Priya saved him by saying, “We’re ready for you now, Mr Foster. If you could just go through that door and stand on the mark?”

On the other side of the window, someone had made a cross with strips of blue tape on the floor, which was covered in seamless, white-speckled yellowish vinyl and reminded Danny of the hospital where his father had died. The window itself was a black rectangle with the shapes of three faces just visible through it, lit eerily from underneath by the glow of monitors. He stood there, feeling anxious, and followed Evan’s piped-in directions to turn to the left, now to the right, until Priya got on the mic and told him in her soothing voice that he could come back, everything looked excellent.

“No radiation?” he asked. Mel had materialised again with the plastic tub as soon as he was through the door, and he was glad to have the distraction of doing up his watch band again as he waited for the answer.

“Negligible,” David said. “A bit more than Joanne, but nowhere near enough to harm you. I expect you could go through another fifteen or twenty wormholes before it began getting to worrying levels.” He gave Danny a clap on the shoulder that would have seemed more natural coming from burly Evan, but was so obviously a well-meant gesture that Danny felt reassured anyway. David was a good sort, he decided, whatever his version of Jo might think.

He left the room to find both older and younger Jo still at the top of the catwalk, dark heads bent close together, speaking in low voices. They both glanced up and looked relieved as he reappeared and started the climb towards them.

Older Jo gave him a meaningful gaze as he arrived. “All right, Danny?”

“Never better.”   

“I told him it was a piece of cake,” young Jo remarked. She had her necklace clasped round her neck again, and Danny saw older Jo was wearing hers as well, the cross resting just below the hollow of her throat in the unbuttoned V of her red silk blouse. He looked from one to the other and was abruptly filled with the same aching, bone-deep fear he’d felt when David had mentioned radiation. No version of Jo was a fragile flower, he knew that, but he thought if anything happened to either of them, he might lose his mind. If this was the way Scott and older Jo had felt when he'd been missing, they'd probably let him off lightly with a bit of scolding and shaking upon his return. 

“Well, now that we’re a happy trio again, it seems we’re in for a treat,” older Jo said briskly, as if she’d sensed the grim turn his thoughts were taking. “Mel says they’re going to show us some of the progress they’ve made on creating a stable one of these wormholes. They’ve got a viewing area down below where it’s safe to watch when they fire up the accelerator.”  She closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to them, grimacing. “I’ll be useless if I don’t eat something soon. I never touched that sandwich you brought back to the office for me. Have we still got a table booked for dinner tomorrow?”

“Yeah, at eight,” Danny said.

“Phone them up and see if they’ll change it for tonight. After a day like this, I’d rather not go home to stand in front of the fridge and eat cold week-old leftovers. Tell them it’s for three instead of two, and lean on them a bit if you need to.”

Danny went out into the cluttered corridor to place his call, and then had to wait to be buzzed back in by Mel, who escorted him down to the viewing area at pit level. It was another dim, glassed-in room, smaller than the one where he’d had his scan, and it was fever-hot and crowded with seven people inside it. He stood between young Jo on his left and older Jo on his right, both of them looking interested and wary at the same time, and hoped he wasn’t sweating badly enough to offend. At least there was no chance of accidentally raising his arms when they were packed in this way, he thought. 

“Will there actually be anything to look at?” young Jo asked Mel, who was standing back with them to give Priya and Evan as much room to work as possible. “When it happened in my timeline, it was more of a feeling than something we could see. The room got darker, and it was hard to breathe.”

“You’ll see it,” Mel confirmed. “We think you must have been nearly on top of the wormhole you were caught up in before, so it expanded around you instead of forming at a distance. Listen, there’s the accelerator starting. It takes a few minutes to get up to speed.”

Danny had been expecting some sort of exotic science-fiction noise, like laser cannons on a spaceship, but instead the accelerator sounded like a cross between a jet engine and the largest electric fan he’d ever heard, a mechanical roar only somewhat dulled by the glass in between them. It cycled up and up and up, with Priya and Evan flipping switches and typing in commands under David’s direction, and then Mel said “There, between those two metal arms. See it?”  

“Jesus," older Jo said. Her voice was perfectly balanced between horror and fascination, and Danny leaned forward, straining to see what she was seeing.

“Where? I can’t--”

“I see it too.” Young Jo grabbed his sleeve from the other side. “Look, Danny. It swallows the light." 

As soon as she said the words, he saw it: not the glowing portal he’d been looking for, but a dark circle, no bigger than he could have made with his hands. It sat just below his eye level, not floating or bobbing, but fixed in place as if it were the point around which the entire universe turned. At its edges, reality seemed to bend smoothly inward, pouring away into the centre and forming a shape that looked like a funnel. 

 _Or a throat_ , he thought, and shuddered despite the overheated atmosphere and the warm bodies pressed against him. He knew he'd already passed through two wormholes that must have been identical, but the idea of doing it again was horrifying. If he'd had to stare down something like that and then willingly throw himself into it to leave 1985, he thought he might still be there, learning how to love cassette tapes and push-button phones. In the pit outside, the accelerator cycled up another level; through its noise, he heard Priya saying “It’s going” and David asking if she could hold it any longer, and then in an instant, the wormhole pulsed twice and collapsed in on itself, leaving empty air.

At once, the accelerator began to ratchet down again, and Mel pumped a fist in triumph. 

“Thirteen seconds! That's the longest one we've done so far. At first we could barely open them for long enough to register that they were even there.”

"It wasn't very big though, was it," young Jo observed. "No one could go through it. They wouldn't fit." 

"Not yet, but just wait," Mel said. "We've made a lot of progress in the last two days. We'll get one that's large and stable enough, sooner or later. And Dr Keating's program is running all day and night, so if a naturally occurring one appears anywhere near, we'll know about it, and if it leads to the right location, you're as good as home." 

"Where did that one lead?" older Jo asked. "Purely out of curiosity." 

"I think it's more _when_ than _where_ ," Danny said. "David told us that wormholes always connect to the same place on different timelines." 

"All right, _when_ did it lead?" Jo was beginning to sound tetchy with hunger and fatigue, which he knew meant half an hour at most before she started melting down. Danny edged away from her as much as he could, trying to give her some space, but now he was crowded up against young Jo, who looked almost as hot and irritable as her counterpart. 

"Sometime in the first half of the twentieth century," David said, turning round from his open laptop. On the screen was the same view they'd been shown earlier, with green waveform models writhing and spinning across the black background. "Most likely the winter between 1940 and 1941, but we're not able to pinpoint with complete certainty yet." 

"Oh, wonderful," older Jo said. "My father was four years old in 1940 and my mum hadn't been born yet, not to mention the small problem of there being a war on the other side. I'm not sending any version of myself to be blown up by an incendiary bomb." 

"Well, we wouldn't be sending anyone through in any case," David said patiently, "not least because that timeline appears to be a completely separate one from any of the three we're dealing with. It'll have split off sometime before 1940, which means there may not even be a war, or--"

Older Jo frowned at him. "What do you mean, _three_ timelines? I thought there were two timelines: the one we're in now, and the one Danny was thrown into. Where does the third timeline come into it?" 

"That's the bit I was trying to explain when Danny came in earlier," young Jo said. "I'm sure David can do it better, though. We'll wait outside. It's broiling in here."  

As David launched into the explanation, she slipped a hand through the crook of Danny's elbow and tugged him towards the door, past Mel who stood back as much as she could to let them by, and right out onto the floor that led to the bottom of the catwalk. The air outside the room was deliciously cool in comparison to the sauna inside, and Jo drew a long breath and then blew a strand of damp, sticking hair off her forehead.

"Thank Christ," she said. "I'd have fainted if I stayed another minute. Not that I could actually have fallen over, with all of us wedged in like sardines. Come on, let's go up and wait near the entrance. I'm sure the other me won't stay any longer than she has to, either." She pulled a face. "I've got to think of something better to call her. Nothing feels quite right." 

"She's having the same problem with you," Danny said. "Maybe we could call you Big Jo and Little Jo." 

"Maybe we could open a wormhole to nowhere and toss you in." Jo gave him a half-playful, half-annoyed shove, and he grinned and started to climb the ramp. 

By the time they'd reached the top, older Jo had come out of the room as well, still deep in conversation with David. Danny had spent hours and hours of his life standing at a discreet distance and watching her talk to people this way, and her body language and expressions were so familiar that he hardly needed words to guess what she was saying. Even from here, David had the same startled, intimidated look that most people got when they experienced Jo Porter at full intensity for the first time. Jo had an exquisitely fine-tuned ability to size people up and coax them into doing what she wanted--a skill he'd seen in its nascent form in the version of her currently standing beside him--but he hoped she wasn't going too hard. On the other hand, he thought, universities had their own special brand of internal politics, so David might know a bit about manipulation himself. 

"He looks a bit scared," young Jo observed. "What do you suppose she's doing?" 

“Probably warning him to look out for men in black," Danny said. "I'm not sure if their research is really a secret, though. They'll have put it on their funding applications. People already know, even if it's just a clerk in a government office somewhere." 

“True,” Jo said, “but it’s one thing to say you’re messing about with beams and accelerators in a lab, and another thing to actually have living, breathing proof that alternate universes exist. It might not be as paranoid as it seems." 

"Might not," Danny said. They watched older Jo finish speaking to David, lay a hand on his arm as if commiserating about something, and then climb the stairs to join them on the catwalk as David wandered away to tinker with some equipment. 

"Did you phone the restaurant?" she asked. 

"Yeah," Danny said. "No luck. They're booked solid for the evening. How about a kebab?"  

"I don't think I'm quite up to a kebab at the moment." Jo looked at her watch and sighed. "And it's getting late. I may as well go home after all."

"To the week-old leftovers?" 

"Well, they won't be any fresher tomorrow," Jo said. She turned to her younger self. "I meant to say earlier, but you're welcome to come and stay with me if Scott and Danny are getting on your nerves. My son’s with his father, so I’ve got a spare room for the next week, and with any luck we’ll have sorted all this out by then. What do you say?" 

Young Jo looked at Danny, uncertain, and at the same moment, older Jo shot him an evil glare that said _don’t you dare interfere, Daniel_.

“It’s your decision,” he said, and saw them both relax, as if he'd passed some sort of test.

“Thanks,” young Jo said to older Jo, “but I think I’ll stay where I am for the moment. Can I hold that invitation in reserve, though? The Foster men _can_ be a pain sometimes.” She kicked Danny’s foot as she said it, and older Jo bit her lip as if to suppress a smile.

“All right then," she said. "Order me a cab, Danny." 

Once they'd left the building and seen older Jo off on her way home, Danny glanced over at young Jo and caught her in mid-yawn. 

"I suppose that means you're not up for a kebab either." 

She laughed. "I could be, but there's something else I'd like to do first, if you don't mind." 

"What is it?" 

“I want to see my house. Of course, I know it’s not my house here, but the place where I live in my own timeline.” She shrugged, looking sheepish. “It’s like you wanting to see your father, that time at the train station. Something from your real life. Can we go?”

“Yeah, of course, but you know it might have changed sometime in the last twenty-three years, right? It was a shock when my dad wasn’t the way I remembered him; I don’t want the same thing to happen to you.”

“I know," Jo said staunchly. "I'll be ready." 

They got a cab of their own, with an uncharacteristically taciturn driver, and sat side by side in the back seat, drowsy and quiet in the aftermath of their long, strange day. Jo leaned against him, her cheek pressed into the scratchy wool of his coat sleeve, and together they watched an endless parade of yellow sodium street lamps unspooling outside the window, interspersed with the lights of passing cars and the neon glow of signs. It was very late now, and Jo's road was mostly asleep when they arrived, with cars parked up nose-to-tail on both sides; only a roaming cat was there to see as Danny told the cabbie to wait and climbed out to join her on the pavement. 

“It’s almost the same,” she said softly as he came up beside her. “The door's been painted and there's a new front path, but the roses under the windows are my mum’s, and if you went round the back you could see my bedroom. I wonder who lives in it now.”

"We could find out." 

"I think I've learnt my lesson about finding things out." She glanced over her shoulder at him. "Did I tell you I looked for the Millers too? Chris and Sharon? I thought that would be safe enough. They're divorced as well. It's practically an epidemic."

"Not your parents, though." 

"No, not them. The other Jo said her mum--my mum--sold this house after Dad died in 2001. I’ll be thirty-four then, can you imagine? Older than you are now.”

“So pretty ancient, then,” Danny said, and she gave him a wry half-smile. It was a disturbingly adult expression, and he thought, not for the first time, that this experience was forcing her to grow up faster than she might otherwise have done; with every passing hour, she seemed less like the girl he'd met at the bus stop and more like her older self. He remembered her saying _I don't think either of us is ever going to be quite the same after this, Danny_ , and squirmed: he didn't want to think that in going to her for help, he'd interfered permanently with the course of her life, but he was beginning to be afraid that he had. 

"They're all right though, the Millers," Jo said, breaking into his thoughts. "They both remarried, and Chris and his new wife moved to Canada. Sharon's here somewhere still, I think. You were right about them being young, too. I didn't see it then, but they were." She hesitated. "It was simpler when the only things we had to worry about were keeping you fed and finding a way to get them out of their flat for the night. I miss it sometimes. It was exhausting, but it was fun in a way too, just the two of us working things out on our own, without so many other people involved. I know I was the one who involved them all, and we do need the help, but...we made a good team, didn’t we?”

“We still do," Danny said. "Always." 

She gave him the smile again--three-quarters this time instead of half--and looked back at the upper windows of the house, dark except for a single low light that might have been a reading lamp. The cat, which had been slinking about in the rosebushes, came all the way out to inspect the strangers, and Danny saw it was black with a white bib and paws, like a less portly version of Jo's cat Felix. He tried to think whether it could somehow be a descendant of Felix's, generations on, but the timelines tangled together in his head and made his brain hurt.

Behind them, the cabbie gave his lights an impatient flash, and Jo sniffed, just once, and turned back to Danny. 

"That's enough," she said. "I'm glad we came, but it's not my house. Not here, not anymore. Let's go home." 

 


	21. Chapter 21

They returned to an empty flat much like the one they’d arrived in two days ago, with the addition of a single light left burning in the kitchen. There was a cold, half-full mug of tea abandoned on the worktop, but no other sign of life.

“Isn’t Scott at home?” Jo came up beside Danny, undoing the zip on her jacket.

“I don’t think so.” He looked into the vacant living room, unchanged from the last time he’d seen it, and then towards Scott’s bedroom, which was shut up and dark. “I was expecting him to be waiting to have that talk with me. Not that I’m sorry not to be having it. I wonder where he is.”

“Maybe he fell through a wormhole,” Jo said dryly, and then held up both hands, palms out, as if warding off Danny’s frown. “Sorry. I know it’s not funny. I’m tired, that’s all. Could he have gone round to his girlfriend’s again?”

“She’s not exactly his girlfriend,” Danny said. “It’s complicated.”

“Relationships usually are, aren’t they? At least that’s the impression I get every time I hear about my future one.” She slipped out of the jacket, unwound Danny’s borrowed scarf from her neck, and draped both of them over the rack in the entryway. “Anyway, whether she’s his girlfriend or his—whatever, he could be with her.”

“Could be,” Danny said. “I just hope he’s not off somewhere telling our mother I’ve gone mental.”

“Would she believe him?”

“Christ, yes. He’s her golden boy. I’ve spent my whole life trying to get a tenth of the attention she gives him.” He dropped his bag on the floor, went into the kitchen and surveyed their options for a very late meal. “We should have gone for that kebab after all. I don’t think Scott’s done any proper food shopping in weeks. It’s either tomato soup or beans.”

“On toast?”

“The bread’s gone.”

“I’ll take the soup.” Jo followed him into the kitchen and hoisted herself up to sit on one of the worktops as he found a clean pan and banged it onto a cooker ring. “Scott wouldn’t really do that, would he? Tell your mum, I mean?”

“Well, he might,” Danny said, tipping soup into the pan, “but it wouldn’t be to get me into trouble, it’d be because he really thought something was wrong. He’s a shit sometimes, but not that much of a shit, and he’s good at keeping secrets. Even when we were kids, he’d cover for me if I broke something or came in late.”

“Mmm.” Jo sounded distracted, and Danny glanced over to see her tracing absent-minded patterns on the ceramic tile with a fingertip. He watched for a moment and realised she was drawing the shape of the wormhole they’d seen in the lab, over and over.

“Hey.” He laid his hand on top of hers, quieting the restless motion. “You’re not going to summon one of them up that way, you know.”

“Imagine how much easier all this would be if I could,” Jo said. She slid down from her perch and went to fetch bowls and spoons, reaching naturally for the right cupboard and drawer as if she’d lived there for years. He supposed it shouldn’t surprise him: older Jo had a sharp memory and rarely needed the painstaking minutes of meetings he kept for her. And talking of older Jo, what was she up to right now? He hadn’t given it much thought in the moment, but now that he was standing here and stirring a pan full of soup, the idea of her going home alone to a buffet of questionable takeaway from the back of the fridge made him feel squirmy inside, as if he’d forsaken her for her younger self.

 _Stop_ , he told himself. She probably hadn't meant it anyway; the last time he’d opened her fridge, he’d found nothing but half a lemon and a pint of semi-skimmed milk staring back. No doubt she was asleep in bed at this very moment, resting up for a full day of dealing with wormholes tomorrow. The soup was bubbling; he gave it a final stir, shut off the heat, filled the bowls and ground some pepper over each one with a flourish, as if he were a waiter in a restaurant.

“Here.” He slid a bowl over to young Jo. “It’ll warm you up.”  

“I’ve heard that one before,” Jo said, taking the bowl and going to sit with it at the breakfast bar. “That time in the hostel lounge, with the terrible coffee.”

“And? You felt better after, didn’t you?”

“As much as I could.” She spooned up some soup as he took a seat beside her. “After the David we’d met there told us about all the other timelines, nothing felt real. When I was on my way home, I sat there looking at all the other people in the bus and thinking that it didn’t matter what he’d said, they were all just copies, and so was I, and the bus, and the road outside, and my house and everything in it. My dad saw me come in and asked what was the matter, and I told him I wasn’t feeling well, and then I went upstairs and crawled into bed and just lay there, shaking. I thought if I closed my eyes, the whole world might disappear.”  

“Yeah, that wasn’t the best night I’ve ever had either,” Danny said, remembering the panic attack he’d had in his bunk at the hostel as the stereo played faintly and people laughed together outside. It had been exactly two weeks ago on his personal clock, but it felt so distant that it might have happened to someone else in another life. “But we both survived it, and here we are. You don’t still feel like a copy, do you?”

She shook her head. “You’d think I would, now I’ve met another version of myself in real life, but I don’t. It’s helped talking to her, actually. Eat your soup, it’s getting cold.”

Danny obeyed without thinking, hardly tasting what was going into his mouth. “What did she say to you that helped?”

“It wasn’t so much what she said, it was seeing that we’re the same, but we're still individuals. It’s like those stories about identical twins, where one of them is taken away and brought up in Australia or something, and when they meet years later they find out they both play golf and wear brown shoes and have wives called Sally, but they’ve each had their own lives as well, and that makes them unique.” She dabbled her spoon absentmindedly in the cooling puddle of soup at the bottom of her bowl. “She did make me feel better about not marrying Iain though, if I don’t want to.”

“How’d she do that?”

Jo’s cheeks went pink, but she answered anyway. “She pointed out that even if she could tell me the exact day and time she fell pregnant with her son, which she can’t, there’s no way to be sure that the same sperm out of hundreds of millions would still arrive at the right moment if I—you know. There are already too many other random variables in play. And she said that it’s all right if he doesn’t exist in my timeline, because he exists in hers and that’s enough. So I can be with whatever person I choose, in my own future.”

“Lucky future person,” Danny said, slurping down the last of his soup. “Ugh, that wasn’t much of a meal. I could murder some toasted cheese right now.”

“I’ll go shopping tomorrow, if you’ll give me the money to do it. I'm sure supermarkets are the same as always, and it’s not as if I’ve got anything else on during the day. Although I was thinking, when I do get home, I’ll still have exams, and I really ought to try to keep up with my revision, if I can.” Jo stacked her bowl on top of his empty one and dropped both their spoons into it with a metallic clatter. “I wonder if the other Jo’s still got her notes from back then. I ought to ask her.”

“Wouldn’t that be cheating?”

“Of course not. I wrote them before the timelines split, and that means they’re mine; they just exist in two places. Well, three places now. Or four. Who knows?” She saw his face and laughed. “Don’t think about it too much, Danny. Isn't that what you keep telling me?"

“I’m not going to think about it at all,” Danny said. “I’m going to bed. We can leave the washing up for morning.”

He let Jo have the bathroom first, and by the time he’d had his own turn and come back, she was sound asleep, a small, quiet shape buried under the duvet with only a few ruffled strands of dark hair showing at the top. Already half asleep himself, he just managed to reach over her and switch off the lamp before collapsing onto his pillow. He was in the midst of a long, confused dream—something about a clock that wouldn't stop ticking, even after he'd smashed it with a hammer and and held it under water—when suddenly the light was on again, blazing in his face as if he were being interrogated. He flung an arm up as a shield, opened bleary eyes, and found Scott looming over him, still dressed for work in shirt and tie, and smelling of the sort of expensive single-malt whisky that older Jo had preferred before she stopped caring what she drank.

“Go ‘way,” he groaned.   

“No. Get up, I want to talk to you.” 

“Now?” He remembered they weren’t alone and pitched his voice deliberately low. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Yeah, right now.”

“All right, all right, but be quiet.”

Danny sat up and found Jo curled on her side, facing away from him, with a hand nestled under her cheek. She didn’t stir as he slid out of bed, tucking the duvet round her to keep her warm, and followed his brother into the living room.

“I thought you said you weren’t shagging her.” Scott jerked his head back toward Danny’s room.

“I’m not.”

“I don’t give a fuck if you are or you aren’t, Danny. I just want to know if I ought to knock before I open your door.”

“You ought to knock one way or the other,” Danny said. He felt groggy and irritable and lacking in patience for Scott at the moment. “I said I’m not. And I’m pretty tired, and I’d like to go back to bed, so what do you want to talk about?

“What do you think?” Scott loosened the knot in his tie, pulled it off and tossed it at the sofa, where it landed at the edge of the leather seat and slithered snakelike onto the floor. “I want to talk about what's going on with you. I was shit-scared when you were gone, but it’s almost worse now that you’re back and won’t shut up about time travel, and wormholes, and—and I don’t know what else. When I came home this evening and you weren’t here, I went to see Mum—”

“Oh God, you didn’t tell her all of it, did you?” He thought about older Jo saying that everyone who knew was at risk, and imagined his mother shouting and carrying on to no avail as she was swept away to a secure government facility. She’d blame him for it, too. _I always knew it would be you who ruined all our lives, Danny_ , she’d say as they were frog-marched past each other in a featureless underground tunnel. Last year he’d read an article about a network of disused Cold War-era bunkers underneath Corsham that would make a good prison for a pair of hapless time travellers and their associates. Was it still there? Jo would know.

“Not about the time travel,” Scott said, dragging him out of his feverish fantasies. “I just said you haven’t been well since you came home and I’ve been worried, and she suggested I ought to take you to a doctor.”

Danny grunted with annoyance. “No surprise that she couldn’t be bothered to do it herself. Remember when I broke my arm falling off your Raleigh Super Burner, and she wouldn’t believe it until the next day and just told me to stop snivelling?”  

“Well, in fairness to her, you were a bit of a sniveller.”   

“I was seven!” He realised he’d nearly shouted it and tried to reel himself back in. “Never mind, it’s not important. Listen, Scott, you can’t tell anyone about the time travel, do you hear me? I don’t mean just Mum, I mean anyone. Jo—not the one in there, the other one—said it’s got to stay a secret. You can talk to her yourself and she’ll tell you.”

“Are you seriously telling me that Joanne Porter, of all people, believes in time travel now?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

Scott sat down on the sofa and bent to pick up his fallen tie, pulling it out straight between his hands as if he were contemplating strangling someone with it. “Not to disappoint you, Danny, but are you sure she’s not just saying that to keep you happy while she works out what to do with you?”

Even though he knew it wasn’t true, the idea made his stomach sink, just for an instant, before he recovered. “You must be joking. Do you really think Jo would play along even for a minute if she thought I was hallucinating about time travel?”

“I don’t think there’s much Jo wouldn’t do if she thought she had to,” Scott said.

“Yeah, well, she’s not. And I didn’t tell her about it, _she_ did.” Danny gestured toward his room again. “Remember Dr Keating from last night? All three of us went to his laboratory to meet his research team and see how they’re creating artificial wormholes. If Jo hadn’t already believed it when she met another version of herself, she would have after that. Do you want me to phone her right now so she can tell you? Say the word and I will.”  

“It’s almost five o’clock in the morning.” Scott stood up again, letting the tie drop.

“That didn’t stop you coming in and waking me up to lecture me,” Danny said. Suddenly he was fully awake, adrenaline surging through his body like a hot current of electricity. “What, you afraid she’ll back me up and you’ll have to admit it’s true?”

“That’s not it, Danny.”

“Yeah it is.” He shoved Scott’s shoulder. “You’d rather have a nutter for a brother than be wrong about something for once in your life. Why else wouldn’t you want to hear the proof? Come on, let’s speak to her. You know she’s not delusional.”

“She’s an alcoholic.”

“What's that got to do with anything? Two minutes ago you thought she was just humouring me. Now all of a sudden she's an unreliable witness. Make up your mind or fuck off. Actually, fuck off anyway.”

He gave Scott another shove, harder this time; Scott seized his wrist, but after twenty-six years of sibling tussles, Danny knew what came next and jerked his elbow up to break the hold before his arm was twisted. A short, largely silent struggle followed, punctuated by an occasional bark of pain or thud as someone collided with the furniture, until they were interrupted by young Jo arriving on the scene like a Greek fury.

"Stop it!" 

They both turned to discover her framed in the doorway, outraged and dazed with sleep at the same time, clutching Danny’s open and illuminated mobile in one hand. Scott took advantage of the distraction to grab for Danny again, and Danny pushed him away.

“Go back to sleep,” he said to Jo as gently as possible. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not bloody _fine_.” Jo’s voice was trembling, but she wasn’t to be deterred. “Look at yourselves. I know you’re brothers, but it doesn’t mean you have to behave like children. Here.” She thrust the mobile out at Scott, who took it automatically.

“What’s this for?”

“I heard Danny say he wanted you to talk to the other Jo." She crossed her arms, defying him to challenge her. "So I phoned her for you." 

“Oh, did you? And how the fuck did you know how to use one of these if you’re meant to be from 1985?” Scott looked at Danny as if to say _I told you so_.

“We’ve got _phones_ in 1985,” Jo said. "It's not that different. And I'm not an idiot who can't work out how to press a few buttons. Are you going to speak to her or leave her there on the line?” She nodded toward the device in Scott’s hand, and looking incredulous, he raised it to his ear.

“Jo—?” He paused, listening. “I know, but—no, I haven’t. Not yet.” He looked back at Danny and young Jo. “You can’t be serious. Yeah, all right. Hang on.” Still cradling the phone against his face, he crossed the living room and went into his own bedroom, closing the door so they could only hear the low murmurs of a one-sided conversation.

“I couldn’t think what else to do.” Jo swallowed hard. “I know I shouldn’t interfere, but I woke up and heard you arguing, and then fighting, and—”

“It’s okay,” Danny said. Now that the quarrel was over, he felt as weary as if he’d never slept at all. “You were right. We were being stupid. Sometimes it’s hard not to react to each other the same way we did when we were kids.”

“One of those sibling things," Jo suggested.

“More or less.” He ran both hands through his hair and then over his burning, aching eyes. Scott had landed a mostly accidental elbow on his cheekbone at some point in their wrestling match, and it was beginning to go from numb to throbbing. “We can’t do anything until the other Jo and Scott have had it out, so we may as well go back to bed. She’ll be wanting me in later this morning, and I’ll be half dead if I don’t get at least another hour's sleep.”

"Can you, after that?" 

"Course I can. I've had lots worse fights with him. Come on." 

The night sky outside was beginning to fade, filling his room with a pale illumination that wasn't quite daylight. It was just enough for him to make out Jo's profile, rendered in greyscale, as she lay staring up at the ceiling. Through the wall, he could still hear Scott on the phone to the other version of her, though not clearly enough to make out what he was saying. 

“I wonder if I really ought to go and stay somewhere else," Jo said, still not looking at him. "Having me here is just making things harder with Scott, and she did offer.” 

“Scott can go fuck himself. I like having you here, and besides, I don't want to impose on her." 

Jo smiled. “It’s not imposing on her, Danny. She didn’t ask me to be polite. She asked because she wanted the company.”

“She told you that?”

“She didn’t have to. I know.” She turned over to face him. “I don’t know everything she’s thinking the way I thought I would, but some things are easy. I’m certain she’d let you come as well, if you wanted to.” 

"We'll see," Danny said. "Maybe she'll be able to talk Scott around. She's good at getting what she wants. You both are." 

"Not always."

"What does that mean?"

"Nothing." Jo worked a hand free from the covers and touched his cheekbone lightly. "You're going to have a mark there. I can see it even in this light. Does it hurt?" 

"A bit. It's not bad." 

"You're a terrible liar." She rubbed the backs of her fingers along the hollow of his cheek, below the sore spot, and wrinkled her nose. "You're all prickly, too. For someone with a patchy rubbish beard, you grow it awfully fast." 

"Jesus," Danny said. "Go on, add insult to injury, why don't you? Don't worry, I can take it. Danny Foster, human punching bag."

That made Jo laugh, stifling the noise with a hand over her mouth to stop Scott hearing her in the other room. "What do you want me to do instead? Kiss it for you?"

"I want you to go to sleep so I can go to sleep," Danny said, and she huffed a sigh and withdrew to her own side of the bed. 

“Fine. Can I listen to your pod thingy?”

“The iPod? Yeah, of course.” He leaned over and fished it out of a drawer in his bedside table, earbuds trailing. "What do you want to hear? Top hits of the Eighties?" 

"No." Jo closed her eyes. "Choose something you think I'll like. Something new. I've got two decades' worth of music to catch up on." 

"Something new, coming up," Danny said. He scrolled through a few options on the iPod's tiny monochrome screen, plugged the earbuds into her ears, and then clicked to start a track playing. She burrowed down under the duvet, and he closed his eyes as well, listening to the faint, faraway sound of the music and trying to breathe slowly and relax. He wondered what the other Jo was saying to Scott, and then he was asleep.   


	22. Chapter 22

He woke again some hours later in rainy grey light, with the sticky, cobwebby feeling of having slept too long and not enough at the same time. There was a warm, heavy weight on his chest that turned out to be Jo, sprawled across him with her head on his shoulder and her hair in his face. Somewhere in the tumbled mess of bedclothes, he could hear his earbuds still emitting a whisper of music, too low for him to identify the song.

Leaving Jo where she was for the moment, he craned his neck and found his mobile sitting in its proper place on the bedside table, plugged into the charger. There was a sticky note on the case that said _Sorry_ in Scott’s small, cramped writing, but whether that meant _Sorry I didn’t believe you_ or _Sorry I hit you_ or some combination of the two was a mystery.

Danny pulled the note off one-handed, crumpled it up, and dropped it on the floor next to the bed so he could see the digital time readout, which informed him that he ought to have been in work half an hour ago. He dug his way through the usual accumulation of messages and missed calls— including his mother, who apparently had felt an actual pang of guilt after speaking to Scott—and unearthed a new message from David, asking him to call when he could, and one from older Jo, saying that she’d be late in herself and to take his time. Well, there was that problem sorted.  

He nudged the version of Jo who was currently using him as a pillow, and she made a sleepy, protesting noise, but rolled off him and yanked the duvet right up over her head.

“Have you got to go to work?” she said through it.

“Yeah.”

“Do you work at the weekends?”

“Not unless there's a crisis." 

“Tell me we’ll both sleep as late as we like tomorrow, then.”

“We’ll both sleep as late as we like tomorrow.” He prodded the parts of the duvet where he thought her sides must be, and she let out a muffled yell and pushed his hands away. “David left a message earlier. I’m about to ring him back. Want to listen?”

Jo wriggled her way out from under the covers and sat up, dishevelled but alert, with her hair slipping out of its untidy ponytail and one of his sweatshirts nearly swallowing her whole. “Of course I do. Did he say what it’s about?”

“Something about results from last night,” Danny said, pressing buttons. “I’ll put it on the speaker so we both can talk.”

This late in the morning, he was expecting to get the recording saying that David was otherwise engaged, but instead David himself answered on the first ring, with the half-interested, half-confused “Hello?” that always made him sound equally pleased to be receiving a call and baffled about why someone might be phoning him.

“It’s Daniel Foster, and Jo’s here with me as well. That’s Jo Rourke, not Jo Porter,” Danny clarified as Jo elbowed him in the ribs. “You said you had some news.”

“Right, of course, Daniel.” David’s tone grew firmer and more assured, and Danny imagined him pushing his specs up on his nose and settling in to talk science. “It’s to do with the scans we took of you and Joanne yesterday, in the lab. You’ll remember that Priya said we were hoping to match markers in your cells to the signatures from different timelines?”

“Yes,” Danny said, looking at Jo, who nodded agreement.

“Well, she and Evan have got what look like three fairly good potential matches so far--one is weaker and the other two are more or less equal, but they’re still running numbers and hoping to find more points of similarity. If we can narrow it down to one, then we can begin the process of either opening a stable artificial wormhole to the right strand, or pinpointing a naturally occurring one that matches up.”

“But you’ll test it first, won’t you?” Jo asked. She was fretting with the remaining plasters on her fingers again, and as Danny watched, she pulled them off, one by one, exposing half-healed crescents of bitten skin. “I don’t want to go through and be trapped in the wrong timeline on my own. I suppose I could find the version of you who lives there and explain this all over, but I’d really rather not.”

“Yes, of course we’ll make quite certain it’s right.” David’s voice through the tiny speaker was staticky, but confident. “You’ve got to fill the empty space left in your own timeline when you came here with Danny; otherwise the act of going through will split the timelines again and create yet another new one, and we don’t want that.”

“Do you have any idea of how long it might take?” Danny asked.

“Anywhere from a few days to a week or two, I think. It depends on how quickly they can do the matching and whether we can work out a way to stabilise the wormholes enough for safety. Priya has some thoughts on how to do that, but they’re still at the talking stage.” David paused. “And, we need to minimise the slippage as much as we can, to make certain Joanne arrives as close as possible to the moment she left her own timeline, but not before.”

“And at a safe location,” Jo put in. “You said we could choose.”

“Possibly, but it’s looking as if manipulating wormholes outside the lab may be more difficult than we’d hoped. And you’ve got to consider—”

In the background of the call, there was a tapping noise, and a distant voice said “Dr Keating…” followed by something incomprehensible. David’s answer was muffled, as if he’d put his hand over the mouthpiece, and then he came back on the line.

“I’m awfully sorry, I’m running late for a lecture. I’ll be in touch again as soon as I’ve got an update. Look after yourselves, you two.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Jo said after Danny had ended the call. “Suppose I pop out in front of people in my own timeline who panic and ring the police? If we’re aiming for the same time I left, it’ll be the middle of the night. My dad would die ten thousand deaths if his colleagues found out his daughter had been arrested.”

“That’s only if it’s a naturally occurring wormhole,” Danny said. “If it’s an artificial one in the lab, you know exactly where you’ll come out.”

“Yes.” Jo drew her knees up to her chest and stretched the frayed green hem of his sweatshirt out, tent-like, to cover them. “In the sub-basement of a university building, also in the middle of the night, and I’ll be locked in. That’s if there’s even anything there twenty-three years ago and I don’t end up buried alive underground.”

“For fuck’s sake.” Danny caught a loose lock of her hair and gave it a gentle pull. “First off, that building’s been there at least since the early Sixties, and second, David won’t let you be buried alive and neither will the other Jo or I, so forget about the Edgar Allan Poe stuff. Maybe I can go through with you, what about that? I’ve already been in your timeline, so it can’t hurt anything for me to go again, just for a few minutes, and then come back as soon as we know you’re safe there.”

“That’s true.” Jo unfolded herself from her sweatshirt tent, seeming to cheer up at least somewhat at this idea. “I’m glad we’re still in this together. To the bitter end, right?”

“To the bitter end,” Danny said.

He washed and dressed quickly—older Jo might have extended him amnesty for being late, but it would run out as soon as she rolled into the office and found a morning’s worth of messages waiting for her—and then gave young Jo his cashpoint card and explained how to use it so she could do the food shopping she’d promised the night before.

“What should I buy?”

“Bread and milk, and then whatever else you like. Just go easy on the avocados, they’re expensive.”

“Avocados?” Jo looked baffled. “You mean those knobbly green things that people serve prawn cocktail in because they think it’s posh? Why would I buy those?”

Danny laughed. “They’ve gone mainstream since your time. You love them. Try one and you’ll see.”

“All right,” Jo said doubtfully, and sent him on his way with one of the swift, sudden cheek kisses that always caught him off guard. He’d have to remind her not to do that in front of Scott, he thought as he went downstairs to meet his cab, or he’d never hear the end of it.

Wrapped up in the difficulties of dealing with his brother, he made his way in to work and found older Jo already in her office, irritably shuffling through files and looking flushed and red-eyed, with damp tendrils of hair around her face, as if she might have cried earlier and then washed away the signs.  

“What’s the matter?”

“Bloody Iain is the matter.” She smacked a bright orange folder down on her desk. “He won’t let go of this idea about taking Clem abroad, and I haven’t got time for it just now. I haven’t got time for people complaining about asbestos either. Couldn’t you have discovered a sort of time travel that would give us more hours in the day?”

“I’ll work on it,” Danny said. “Here, I’m sure you’ve already had your coffee, but I brought you one anyway. You look as if you could do with a second infusion.”

“Thanks a lot.” She glared at him and then softened. “Thanks really too, though. I didn’t stop on the way in, as it happens. How are things at home?”

“You tell me,” Danny said. “I woke up to a one-word note from Scott. It sounded as if he might be changing his mind. What did you say to him?”

Older Jo popped open the lid on her cup and licked a creamy lace of foam delicately from the inner rim. “I confirmed what you’d already told him and warned him not to talk about it to anyone. I don't think he believed me either at first. He’d probably have sniffed me for alcohol fumes if we’d been in the same room. That’s the trouble with having a drink problem; people think you’re back on it every time you’ve got a headache or you’ve had a late night or you need to warn them about portals to other realities.”

“But you convinced him?”

“I made a start on it,” Jo said. She put her cup down and leaned across the desk to touch his bruised cheek, with the same butterfly-soft brush of fingers as younger Jo. “Hopefully enough of a start to save your face from any more of this.”    

“It’s all right.”   

“And—is _she_ all right?”

There was no need to ask who _she_ was. “She’s fine.”

“That’s a relief,” Jo said. “She was nearly in tears when she phoned and woke me. She’s got no experience with sibling fights. Not that I have either, but I know you and Scott, and if you haven’t killed each other yet, you’re not likely to do it now.”

“Only because I know you wouldn’t help me hide the body,” Danny said. “Anyway, the trauma hasn’t damaged her. She’s out experiencing the wonders of the modern supermarket as we speak.”

“You let her go alone?”  

“Well, yeah. I can’t keep her a prisoner, can I?” A crooked heap of file folders began a long, slow slide from the top of the desk to the floor, and he reached out and caught them before they could go too far. “And it’s fine. I went to all sorts of places when I was in 1985. Including your old school, by the way. You’ve turned out surprisingly well adjusted for someone who spent her formative years shut up with nuns every day.”

Jo ignored this as the irrelevant remark it probably was. “It was different for you to go wandering about in 1985. No one there knew you’d come from another time except for you and—and _her_ , did they?”

“No,” Danny said. “When we spoke to the younger version of David, we asked him about time travel, but we told him it was because I was writing a book. His sister knew about me—we met once, for a minute or two—but she didn’t know who I was, really. She thought we were—I mean she wanted Jo, the other Jo, to—er—”

He floundered to a halt, and she smiled a little, with a tinge of sorrow—not young Jo’s fresh, raw grief, but an old, weary, calcified sadness that had had time to work its way deep into her heart. “It’s fine, Danny. I know what she would have wanted her to do. She was always trying to choose boyfriends for me. She thought Iain was a twat, by the way. I ought to have listened to her about that one.”

“You’d kept in touch over all those years?”

“Oh yes,” Jo said. “Straight through to the end. I’d had an email from her a few days before she was killed, but I hadn’t answered it yet because I was still feeding the baby round the clock, and—well. I wish I had done, but she wouldn’t have been angry about it. Annie understood things.”

She pressed her lips together and turned back to the files, hunting through the stack as if she thought the answer to all their problems might be buried there. “Anyway, the point is that no one knew in that timeline, but lots of people know in this one, and that multiplies the odds of something slipping out.”

An uneasy memory from his pre-dawn confrontation with Scott surfaced in Danny’s mind—the image of his mother captured, imprisoned—but he pushed it under again. Scott hadn’t told anyone; the secret was still a secret. They were safe. 

“It’s not _lots_ of people,” he said, rather defensively.

“Isn’t it?” Jo left the files alone for a moment and held up a hand to tick off names. “You. Her. Me. Scott. David. Priya. Mel. And Ewan or Stephen or whatever his name was.”

“Evan.”

“All right, Evan. That makes eight. I know three of us won’t breathe a word, and I’m fairly certain I’ve impressed it on Scott to keep quiet as well, but that leaves four people who all have friends and families and colleagues and partners, and any of them might let something slip at a meeting, or in the university canteen, or lying in bed at night.”

She saw Danny about to interrupt and made a gesture to silence him. “You know how much trouble we have keeping things quiet even in our own work, Danny, and pensions for police officers and early intervention schemes for disadvantaged youths aren’t half as gossip-worthy as time travel. It might not even be one of the people we know who’ll do the gossiping; it might be a cleaner who overhears something in the midst of sweeping up the lab.”

“Shit.” 

“Yes,” Jo said. “I had a word with David last night about being more careful, asking his staff to take a few precautions, but he’s so in love with his work that I think he’d smile and nod to anything that let him keep pursuing it. He wants to help us, and he means to if he can, but he also wants to find out exactly what the wormholes are capable of, and to sort of _own_ them, if you see what I mean. He’ll want to make a formal announcement or publish a paper sooner rather than later, mark my words.”

“What can we do?” 

Jo finally found the file she’d been looking for and clasped it to her chest. “I had time to think about it early this morning, after I spoke to Scott, and I think all three of you ought to find someplace else to be for the next little while. It didn’t seem as urgent before, but I remembered David’s been to your flat—”

“ _No_ ,” Danny said sharply. “He’s not like that. He wouldn’t sell us out. I know he wouldn’t.” 

“Not deliberately,” Jo said, “but he might be forced to tell someone how to find you. I’m not saying it’s likely—it probably isn’t—but it’s _possible_. If one of the others talks to the wrong people—”

“You don’t know that’s going to happen.”

“And you don’t know it isn’t.” She shifted the file folder to the crook of one arm and reached over to rest her free hand on his shoulder. “Help me protect you, Danny. Both of you. I can't keep it under wraps forever—if they really can control the wormholes, it's a security threat and I'll have to tell someone—but I want to see her safely home first.” 

“All right.” 

Bells began to chime outside, and Jo crammed her mobile into her pocket and scooped up her leather-bound organiser, stacking it on top of the folder. “I’ve got to go to this meeting, there’s no escaping it, but while I’m away, I want you to go collect her and take her to my flat instead of yours and Scott’s. It won’t be safe there forever, they’re still arguing over whether to release all our addresses to the public or not, but at least for now it’s all right. Have you got the spare key I gave you?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Good. Pack a bag for yourself and one for her. Phone Scott and tell him to do the same. You can forward my calls.” She brushed past him, heading towards the door.

“Jo?”

“Yes?”

“About what Annie wanted to happen—it hasn’t. I didn’t.”

“I know, Danny.” Jo’s expression was hard to read fully, but he could see she meant it. Whether younger Jo had said something during their private conversation, or she’d just intuited it in the slightly creepy way the two of them had with each other, he couldn’t tell.

“Okay.” His whole face felt stiff and hot with embarrassment, but he pressed on. “I just thought—I wanted to be clear about that. Scott keeps bringing it up.”

“I’m sure Scott does.” Jo pushed the door open. “I appreciate you wanting to put my mind at ease, Danny, but that’s a small item on the list of issues at the moment. Just go and handle this for me.”

He hadn’t been nervous until he left the office, but as soon as he was in a cab, he felt he couldn’t possibly get home fast enough. The driver was a small, thin man who sat hunched forward with his seat drawn up to the wheel, no doubt so his little feet could reach the pedals, and the shape of his balding head and the crook of his neck from behind reminded Danny of a cartoon tortoise, motoring obliviously along a country road without a care in the world. He tried phoning home once, hoping young Jo would be back from her shopping already, but there was no answer, so he left a brief just-checking-in message and then forced himself to disconnect and not to keep trying. It hadn’t made him feel any better, and he’d be there soon enough.

He sat back with the phone clasped in one hand, the fingers of his other hand drumming out a restless rhythm on the window frame, and eventually the tortoise motored up to his building and he was able to escape and take the steps two at a time. At the top he fumbled for his keys, couldn’t find them for a moment, and thought wildly of the night in 1985 when he’d picked the lock to let himself and young Jo in. If he only had a paper clip, he thought, and then his groping fingers closed on the key fob deep in his pocket.

“Jo?” He pushed the unlocked door open, bracing himself for her not to be there, but almost at once he saw her in the kitchen, her back turned to him, putting something away in a cupboard. Two mostly unpacked carrier bags sat on the breakfast bar, surrounded by ham, cheese, strawberries, bananas, packets of cereal and biscuits and crisps, and, he noted with a combination of relief and mild amusement, a single avocado.

Jo finished doing whatever she was doing and turned round again, and the blood drained out of her face as she caught sight of him.

“Danny, oh my God.” She pulled an earbud out of her ear, and he realised she’d been listening to his iPod again and hadn't heard the phone at all. “Don’t creep up on me that way. What are you doing here? I thought you’d gone to work.”

“I did. The other Jo sent me home.”

“Why?” Jo disentangled herself from both earbuds and laid the iPod down next to a seven-pack of Mars Bars and a fresh supply of gum. “Are you ill? Let me feel your forehead.”

“No, it’s not that. She’s insisting you come and stay with her after all. I’m meant to pack you up and take you to her flat.”

“Oh, are you?” The concern on Jo’s face began to morph into a worrying rebellion. “Haven’t we already discussed this? You didn’t want me to go when I was the one who wanted to. Now you’re ready to bundle me off just because she said so. Why is that, Danny?”

“Because what she said frightened me.” Danny held out a hand to her, pleading for cooperation. “And it’s not only you, it’s both of us. I’m coming with you—you were right about her letting me—and Scott’s got to clear out as well. I’ll tell you all about it on the way there; we’ve just got to get a few things together first.”

“But…” Jo gestured at the food on the worktop. “What about all this? It won’t stay fresh if we’re gone for days and days.”

“Put it back into the bags and bring it along,” Danny said. “We’ll need it. The other Jo hasn’t been shopping in even longer than Scott.”

 

 


End file.
